Bartow, FL
Bartow, FL's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Out of every US place USFS scores, Bartow lands at the 96th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a figure built from its 7,920 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Bartow at the 97th national percentile — 1 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
USFS puts 60.4% of Bartow's 7,920 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 36% Direct and 3.6% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to. At 7,920 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Bartow against the rest of the country
Bartow scores 96th nationally and 95th within Florida — close enough that its state context doesn't change the picture the national number already gives. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Bartow ranks 1,193 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,141 by building count (1 is largest). Within Florida alone, it ranks 42 of 955 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Florida on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Bartow
Bartow's 96th-percentile, very high rating is the kind of score behind a broader national pattern: insurers pulling back from the highest wildfire-risk markets, non-renewing or declining new policies outright, most visibly in California. Shopping around, not assuming automatic renewal, tends to matter here.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Because 60.4% of Bartow's buildings sit in the Indirect zone, sealing the ember pathway (vents, roofing, gutters) is the intervention this page's data actually supports — see the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Bartow's 1,193-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Bartow, see the exposure-zones guide.