Eastern Goleta Valley, CA
How exposed is Eastern Goleta Valley to wildfire?
Out of every US place USFS scores, Eastern Goleta Valley lands at the 97th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a figure built from its 11,077 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Eastern Goleta Valley at the 95th percentile, close to its 97th-percentile risk score.
Eastern Goleta Valley's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS classifies 40.2% of Eastern Goleta Valley's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 30.3% Direct and 29.6% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 11,077 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Eastern Goleta Valley ranks
Eastern Goleta Valley's 97th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 78th ranking inside California does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 18 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Eastern Goleta Valley ranks 1,094 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,436 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 344 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
Eastern Goleta Valley 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 97th-percentile score like Eastern Goleta Valley's can end up mattering for. More on the disclosure law.
What would actually reduce this score
Eastern Goleta Valley's 40.2% 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
Every one of the two percentiles behind Eastern Goleta Valley's 1,094-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Eastern Goleta Valley, see the exposure-zones guide.