Carlsbad, CA
Carlsbad, CA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Carlsbad's 37,627 buildings earn a 69th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — well above the national norm for wildfire risk. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Carlsbad at the 68th national percentile — 1 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Carlsbad's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS classifies 69.4% of Carlsbad's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 3.4% Direct and 27.1% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 37,627 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Carlsbad compares
Inside California, Carlsbad sits at just the 26th percentile even though it scores 69th 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, Carlsbad ranks 9,759 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 271 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,155 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Carlsbad and the insurance market
Carlsbad's 69th-percentile score lands in California, the only two states requiring a wildfire disclosure at sale. California's surplus-lines homeowners market passed 300,000 policies for the first time in 2025, driven by carriers pulling back from wildfire-exposed areas statewide. The disclosure-law guide covers what it requires.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Carlsbad's 69.4% 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 Carlsbad's 9,759-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Carlsbad, see the exposure-zones guide.