Benton, CA
How exposed is Benton to wildfire?
Benton sits at the 89th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 297 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Benton at the 87th percentile, close to its 89th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Of Benton's 297 counted buildings, 85.2% carry Direct exposure and only 0% carry Minimal — a lopsided split that puts defensible-space clearing ahead of vents or roofing as the intervention worth doing first.
How Benton compares
Benton's 89th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 59th ranking inside California does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 30 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Benton ranks 3,423 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 21,701 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 641 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Benton sits in California, one of two states that legally require a wildfire-risk disclosure at sale. California's FAIR Plan, the state's insurer of last resort, ended 2025 with 668,609 residential policies after adding 21,859 in Q4 alone — the kind of market shift a 89th-percentile score like Benton's can end up mattering for. More on the disclosure law.
Hardening a home in Benton
Because Direct exposure dominates in Benton (85.2%), the highest-leverage fix is defensible space, not roofing or vents alone — covered in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Benton's 3,423-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Benton, see the exposure-zones guide.