Daly City, CA
How exposed is Daly City to wildfire?
Daly City's 22,339 buildings earn a 55th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — modestly above the national average for wildfire risk. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Daly City at the 54th national percentile — 1 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Daly City's buildings actually sit
57.5% of Daly City's 22,339 buildings sit in USFS's Minimal exposure zone, with only 1% rated Direct — risk here comes from regional burn probability more than proximity to burnable vegetation at the structure itself. At 22,339 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Daly City against the rest of the country
Daly City's 55th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 14th ranking inside California does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 41 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Daly City ranks 14,207 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 605 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,350 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Daly City and the insurance market
Because Daly City 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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Even with 57.5% of Daly City outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones, basic hardening — gutter maintenance, ember-resistant vents — is inexpensive relative to the regional burn-probability risk noted above. Details in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Daly City's 55th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Daly City, see the exposure-zones guide.