Cerritos, CA
How exposed is Cerritos to wildfire?
Out of every US place USFS scores, Cerritos lands at the 33rd percentile for wildfire risk to structures — close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range — a figure built from its 15,358 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 Cerritos at the 40th percentile, close to its 33rd-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Only 0.5% of Cerritos's 15,358 buildings carry Direct exposure and 0% carry Indirect; the remaining 99.5% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 15,358 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Cerritos against the rest of the country
Inside California, Cerritos sits at just the 4th percentile even though it scores 33rd 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, Cerritos ranks 20,979 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 962 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,513 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Cerritos
Cerritos 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 33rd-percentile score like Cerritos's can end up mattering for. More on the disclosure law.
What would actually reduce this score
Cerritos's 99.5% 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 Cerritos's figures come from
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 15,358 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Cerritos. The exposure-zones guide covers what Cerritos's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.