Cottonwood (Yavapai), AZ
Cottonwood (Yavapai), AZ's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Cottonwood (Yavapai) sits at the 85th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 5,807 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Cottonwood (Yavapai) at the 86th percentile, close to its 85th-percentile risk score.
Cottonwood (Yavapai)'s building exposure, zone by zone
USFS puts 80.4% of Cottonwood (Yavapai)'s 5,807 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 12% Direct and 7.6% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to. At 5,807 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Cottonwood (Yavapai) compares
Inside Arizona, Cottonwood (Yavapai) sits at just the 56th percentile even though it scores 85th 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, Cottonwood (Yavapai) ranks 4,589 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,970 by building count (1 is largest). Within Arizona alone, it ranks 195 of 441 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Arizona on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Cottonwood (Yavapai)'s 85th-percentile, very high rating is the kind of score behind a broader national pattern: insurers pulling back from the highest wildfire-risk markets, non-renewing or declining new policies outright, most visibly in California. Shopping around, not assuming automatic renewal, tends to matter here.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Because 80.4% of Cottonwood (Yavapai)'s buildings sit in the Indirect zone, sealing the ember pathway (vents, roofing, gutters) is the intervention this page's data actually supports — see the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 5,807 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Cottonwood (Yavapai). For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Cottonwood (Yavapai), see the exposure-zones guide.