Fair Oaks, CA
How exposed is Fair Oaks to wildfire?
Out of every US place USFS scores, Fair Oaks lands at the 70th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a figure built from its 12,804 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 Fair Oaks at the 70th percentile, close to its 70th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Only 15.1% of Fair Oaks's 12,804 buildings carry Direct exposure and 16.9% carry Indirect; the remaining 68% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 12,804 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Fair Oaks compares
Inside California, Fair Oaks 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, Fair Oaks ranks 9,477 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,191 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,141 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
Fair Oaks 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 Fair Oaks's can end up mattering for. More on the disclosure law.
Hardening a home in Fair Oaks
With 68% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Fair Oaks gets less benefit from structure hardening than a Direct- or Indirect-dominant place would — the home-hardening guide explains why the zone matters.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 12,804 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Fair Oaks. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Fair Oaks, see the exposure-zones guide.