Carmichael, CA
Carmichael wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Carmichael at the 53rd national percentile for risk to structures, modestly above the national average for wildfire risk — a score built from 25,832 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Carmichael at the 54th national percentile — 2 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Carmichael's buildings actually sit
Carmichael rates 69.6% Minimal exposure against just 6.9% Direct and 23.6% Indirect — of 25,832 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 25,832 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Carmichael against the rest of the country
Carmichael's 53rd national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 13th ranking inside California does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 40 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Carmichael ranks 14,930 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 486 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,374 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Carmichael sits in California, one of two states that legally require a wildfire-risk disclosure at sale. California's FAIR Plan, the state's insurer of last resort, ended 2025 with 668,609 residential policies after adding 21,859 in Q4 alone — the kind of market shift a 53rd-percentile score like Carmichael's can end up mattering for. More on the disclosure law.
What would actually reduce this score
Carmichael'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.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Carmichael's 14,930-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Carmichael, see the exposure-zones guide.