El Nido, CA
El Nido wildfire risk explained
USFS scores El Nido at the 70th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 182 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, El Nido's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 68th percentile nationally.
Where El Nido's buildings actually sit
Of El Nido's 182 counted buildings, 56.6% carry Direct exposure and only 42.3% carry Minimal — a lopsided split that puts defensible-space clearing ahead of vents or roofing as the intervention worth doing first.
Where El Nido ranks
Inside California, El Nido sits at just the 27th percentile even though it scores 70th 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 Nido ranks 9,508 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 25,526 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,144 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
El Nido and the insurance market
El Nido 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 70th-percentile score like El Nido's can end up mattering for. More on the disclosure law.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
El Nido's 56.6% Direct-exposure share means lot clearing around the structure typically outweighs any single material upgrade here. The home-hardening guide ranks the options for a place shaped like this.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind El Nido's 9,508-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond El Nido, see the exposure-zones guide.