Bellevue, WA
Bellevue, WA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS scores Bellevue at the 30th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range), a figure built from 38,692 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Bellevue at the 26th percentile, close to its 30th-percentile risk score.
Bellevue's building exposure, zone by zone
Only 6.1% of Bellevue's 38,692 buildings carry Direct exposure and 17.4% carry Indirect; the remaining 76.5% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 38,692 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Bellevue compares
Bellevue's 49th-percentile standing inside Washington outpaces its 30th national percentile — this is a hotter spot than most of its own state, even though the state as a whole runs cooler nationally. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Bellevue ranks 22,203 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 256 by building count (1 is largest). Within Washington alone, it ranks 322 of 628 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Washington on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Bellevue
Bellevue's moderate wildfire rating (30th percentile) isn't the kind of score driving the carrier pullback making news in the highest-risk Western markets — but a standard homeowners quote is still worth comparing on its own terms.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Even with 76.5% of Bellevue outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones, basic hardening — gutter maintenance, ember-resistant vents — is inexpensive relative to the regional burn-probability risk noted above. Details in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Bellevue's 22,203-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Bellevue, see the exposure-zones guide.