El Cajon, CA
How exposed is El Cajon to wildfire?
El Cajon's 23,215 buildings earn a 92nd-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts El Cajon at the 90th percentile, close to its 92nd-percentile risk score.
El Cajon's building exposure, zone by zone
Only 1.4% of El Cajon's 23,215 buildings carry Direct exposure and 15.3% carry Indirect; the remaining 83.3% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 23,215 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
El Cajon against the rest of the country
Inside California, El Cajon sits at just the 66th percentile even though it scores 92nd 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, El Cajon ranks 2,571 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 565 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 534 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
El Cajon and the insurance market
El Cajon 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 92nd-percentile score like El Cajon's can end up mattering for. More on the disclosure law.
Hardening a home in El Cajon
El Cajon's 83.3% 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 El Cajon's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind El Cajon's 2,571-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what El Cajon's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.