Chula Vista, CA
Chula Vista wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Chula Vista at the 93rd national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 62,206 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Chula Vista's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 93rd percentile nationally.
Where Chula Vista's buildings actually sit
Chula Vista rates 74.3% Minimal exposure against just 1.6% Direct and 24.1% Indirect — of 62,206 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 62,206 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Chula Vista ranks
Inside California, Chula Vista sits at just the 68th percentile even though it scores 93rd 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, Chula Vista ranks 2,321 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 123 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 507 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
Chula Vista's 93rd-percentile score lands in California, the only two states requiring a wildfire disclosure at sale. California's surplus-lines homeowners market passed 300,000 policies for the first time in 2025, driven by carriers pulling back from wildfire-exposed areas statewide. The disclosure-law guide covers what it requires.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Chula Vista's 74.3% 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 Chula Vista's 2,321-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Chula Vista, see the exposure-zones guide.