Bradenton, FL
How exposed is Bradenton to wildfire?
USFS scores Bradenton at the 71st national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 17,324 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 Bradenton at the 71st percentile, close to its 71st-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Only 7.1% of Bradenton's 17,324 buildings carry Direct exposure and 0% carry Indirect; the remaining 93% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 17,324 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Bradenton compares
Inside Florida, Bradenton sits at just the 28th percentile even though it scores 71st 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, Bradenton ranks 9,164 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 824 by building count (1 is largest). Within Florida alone, it ranks 691 of 955 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Florida on its state page.
Bradenton and the insurance market
Bradenton's 71st-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 Bradenton
Bradenton's 93% 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.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Bradenton's 9,164-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Bradenton, see the exposure-zones guide.