Bishop, CA
Bishop wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Bishop at the 74th national percentile for risk to structures, well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a score built from 1,924 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Bishop at the 77th national percentile — 4 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
89.2% of Bishop's 1,924 buildings fall in USFS's Indirect exposure zone — ember cast rather than direct flame — against 10.8% Direct and 0% Minimal. Vent screens and roofing material matter more here than lot clearing alone.
Where Bishop ranks
Bishop's 74th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 31st ranking inside California does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 42 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Bishop ranks 8,340 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 7,696 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,078 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Bishop
Because Bishop is in California, a wildfire-hazard disclosure is legally required before a sale closes here — unusual nationally, since only these two states mandate it. The state's FAIR Plan alone carried 668,609 policies by the end of 2025. Full detail in the disclosure-law guide.
What would actually reduce this score
Because 89.2% of Bishop'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 Bishop's 8,340-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Bishop, see the exposure-zones guide.