Bozeman, MT
Bozeman, MT's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Bozeman at the 73rd national percentile for risk to structures, well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a score built from 16,908 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 Bozeman at the 73rd percentile, close to its 73rd-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Only 15.2% of Bozeman's 16,908 buildings carry Direct exposure and 15.2% carry Indirect; the remaining 69.6% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 16,908 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Bozeman ranks
Inside Montana, Bozeman sits at just the 42nd percentile even though it scores 73rd 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, Bozeman ranks 8,447 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 857 by building count (1 is largest). Within Montana alone, it ranks 274 of 475 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Montana on its state page.
Bozeman and the insurance market
Bozeman's 73rd-percentile, 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.
Hardening a home in Bozeman
Bozeman's 69.6% Minimal-exposure share means structure-level hardening matters less here than it would elsewhere — still worth the low-cost basics, per the home-hardening guide.
Where Bozeman's figures come from
Bozeman's 73rd-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Bozeman's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.