Cary, IL
How exposed is Cary to wildfire?
Out of every US place USFS scores, Cary lands at the 32nd percentile for wildfire risk to structures — close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range — a figure built from its 5,890 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Cary at the 33rd percentile, close to its 32nd-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
USFS classifies 88.6% of Cary's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 6.7% Direct and 4.7% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 5,890 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Cary ranks
Compare Cary's two percentiles: 82nd within Illinois, only 32nd nationally — a gap of 50 points that marks it as unusually exposed for its own state. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Cary ranks 21,485 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,925 by building count (1 is largest). Within Illinois alone, it ranks 259 of 1,445 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Illinois on its state page.
Cary and the insurance market
Cary's moderate rating (32nd percentile nationally) sits outside the range where wildfire risk alone reshapes an insurance market — still, a homeowner here loses nothing by comparing rates.
What would actually reduce this score
With 88.6% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Cary gets less benefit from structure hardening than a Direct- or Indirect-dominant place would — the home-hardening guide explains why the zone matters.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 5,890 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Cary. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Cary, see the exposure-zones guide.