Cupertino, CA
How exposed is Cupertino to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Cupertino at the 78th national percentile for risk to structures, well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a score built from 16,559 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Cupertino at the 77th national percentile — 1 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Cupertino's buildings actually sit
53.3% of Cupertino's 16,559 buildings sit in USFS's Minimal exposure zone, with only 3% rated Direct — risk here comes from regional burn probability more than proximity to burnable vegetation at the structure itself. At 16,559 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Cupertino against the rest of the country
Inside California, Cupertino sits at just the 37th percentile even though it scores 78th 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, Cupertino ranks 7,049 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 873 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 992 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Cupertino
Because Cupertino 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
Cupertino's 53.3% 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.
Where Cupertino's figures come from
Cupertino's 78th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Cupertino's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.