Belton, TX
Belton wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Belton at the 81st national percentile for risk to structures, in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a score built from 7,599 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Belton at the 80th percentile, close to its 81st-percentile risk score.
Belton's building exposure, zone by zone
Most of Belton's buildings (59.9%) sit in the Indirect zone, where wind-blown embers rather than flame front are the mechanism USFS is scoring — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing are the interventions this pattern favors, more than defensible space alone. At 7,599 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Belton ranks
Inside Texas, Belton sits at just the 63rd percentile even though it scores 81st nationally — the state's overall wildfire exposure is high enough to make this a relatively quiet corner of it. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Belton ranks 6,094 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,250 by building count (1 is largest). Within Texas alone, it ranks 663 of 1,795 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Texas on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
At the 81st percentile nationally, Belton carries the very high rating that has pushed some carriers to limit new business in similarly-scored places elsewhere in the country. Worth comparing quotes rather than assuming last year's renewal terms still apply.
What would actually reduce this score
Because 59.9% of Belton'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
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 7,599 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Belton. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Belton, see the exposure-zones guide.