Carlton, MT
How exposed is Carlton to wildfire?
USFS scores Carlton at the 89th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 693 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 Carlton at the 90th percentile, close to its 89th-percentile risk score.
Where Carlton's buildings actually sit
Of Carlton's 693 counted buildings, 98.7% 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 Carlton compares
There's little gap between Carlton's 89th national percentile and its 76th percentile inside Montana, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Carlton ranks 3,339 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 14,735 by building count (1 is largest). Within Montana alone, it ranks 115 of 475 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Montana on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Carlton
Carlton's very high rating (89th percentile) puts it among the places where the national carrier-pullback trend is most relevant — not a guarantee of a coverage problem, but a reason to shop rather than assume.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
With 98.7% of Carlton in Direct exposure, defensible-space clearing and ember-resistant construction (vents, Class-A roofing) address the exposure this page's own numbers describe, not a generic checklist. See the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Carlton's 3,339-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Carlton, see the exposure-zones guide.