Cedar Rapids, NE
How exposed is Cedar Rapids to wildfire?
USFS scores Cedar Rapids at the 25th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range), a figure built from 321 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 Cedar Rapids at the 21st percentile, close to its 25th-percentile risk score.
Where Cedar Rapids's buildings actually sit
USFS classifies 96.3% of Cedar Rapids's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 3.7% Direct and 0% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one.
How Cedar Rapids compares
There's little gap between Cedar Rapids's 25th national percentile and its 13th percentile inside Nebraska, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Cedar Rapids ranks 23,544 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 21,062 by building count (1 is largest). Within Nebraska alone, it ranks 507 of 583 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Nebraska on its state page.
Cedar Rapids and the insurance market
Cedar Rapids's moderate wildfire rating (25th percentile) isn't the kind of score driving the carrier pullback making news in the highest-risk Western markets — but a standard homeowners quote is still worth comparing on its own terms.
What would actually reduce this score
Cedar Rapids's 96.3% 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 Cedar Rapids's 23,544-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Cedar Rapids, see the exposure-zones guide.