Desert Center, CA
Desert Center, CA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS scores Desert Center at the 9th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally), a figure built from 326 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Desert Center at the 12th national percentile — 3 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Only 16.3% of Desert Center's 326 buildings carry Direct exposure and 16.6% carry Indirect; the remaining 67.2% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure.
How Desert Center compares
Desert Center scores 9th nationally and 0th within California — close enough that its state context doesn't change the picture the national number already gives. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Desert Center ranks 28,827 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 20,912 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,565 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Desert Center and the insurance market
Desert Center 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 9th-percentile score like Desert Center's can end up mattering for. More on the disclosure law.
Hardening a home in Desert Center
Desert Center's 67.2% 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
Desert Center's 9th-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 Desert Center, see the exposure-zones guide.