Excelsior, MN
Excelsior wildfire risk explained
Excelsior's 813 buildings earn a 39th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Excelsior at the 39th percentile, close to its 39th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
USFS classifies 86.1% of Excelsior's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 13.9% Direct and 0% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one.
How Excelsior compares
There's little gap between Excelsior's 39th national percentile and its 53rd percentile inside Minnesota, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Excelsior ranks 19,160 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 13,523 by building count (1 is largest). Within Minnesota alone, it ranks 430 of 914 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Minnesota on its state page.
Excelsior and the insurance market
Excelsior's moderate wildfire rating (39th percentile) isn't the kind of score driving the carrier pullback making news in the highest-risk Western markets — but a standard homeowners quote is still worth comparing on its own terms.
What would actually reduce this score
Even with 86.1% of Excelsior outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones, basic hardening — gutter maintenance, ember-resistant vents — is inexpensive relative to the regional burn-probability risk noted above. Details in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Excelsior's 19,160-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Excelsior, see the exposure-zones guide.