Cathedral City, CA
How exposed is Cathedral City to wildfire?
Cathedral City's 18,174 buildings earn a 63rd-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 Cathedral City at the 62nd national percentile — 0 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Cathedral City's buildings actually sit
Only 0.5% of Cathedral City's 18,174 buildings carry Direct exposure and 20.2% carry Indirect; the remaining 79.2% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 18,174 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Cathedral City against the rest of the country
Inside California, Cathedral City sits at just the 21st percentile even though it scores 63rd 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, Cathedral City ranks 11,713 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 785 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,242 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Cathedral City
Because Cathedral City is in California, a wildfire-hazard disclosure is legally required before a sale closes here — unusual nationally, since only these two states mandate it. The state's FAIR Plan alone carried 668,609 policies by the end of 2025. Full detail in the disclosure-law guide.
What would actually reduce this score
Cathedral City's 79.2% 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.
Where Cathedral City's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Cathedral City's 11,713-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Cathedral City's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.