Elgin, IL
Elgin wildfire risk explained
Out of every US place USFS scores, Elgin lands at the 26th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range — a figure built from its 33,619 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 Elgin at the 26th percentile, close to its 26th-percentile risk score.
Where Elgin's buildings actually sit
Only 2.9% of Elgin's 33,619 buildings carry Direct exposure and 0% carry Indirect; the remaining 97.1% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 33,619 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Elgin ranks
Compare Elgin's two percentiles: 74th within Illinois, only 26th nationally — a gap of 48 points that marks it as unusually exposed for its own state. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Elgin ranks 23,219 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 324 by building count (1 is largest). Within Illinois alone, it ranks 376 of 1,445 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Illinois on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Elgin
Elgin's moderate rating (26th percentile nationally) sits outside the range where wildfire risk alone reshapes an insurance market — still, a homeowner here loses nothing by comparing rates.
Hardening a home in Elgin
Elgin's 97.1% 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
Elgin's 26th-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 Elgin, see the exposure-zones guide.