Fontana, CA
Fontana wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Fontana at the 99th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 55,152 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Fontana at the 98th national percentile — 1 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Fontana rates 75.9% Minimal exposure against just 2.7% Direct and 21.5% Indirect — of 55,152 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 55,152 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Fontana ranks
There's little gap between Fontana's 99th national percentile and its 87th percentile inside California, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Fontana ranks 470 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 152 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 216 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Fontana and the insurance market
Fontana's 99th-percentile score lands in California, the only two states requiring a wildfire disclosure at sale. California's surplus-lines homeowners market passed 300,000 policies for the first time in 2025, driven by carriers pulling back from wildfire-exposed areas statewide. The disclosure-law guide covers what it requires.
What would actually reduce this score
With 75.9% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Fontana 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
Fontana's 99th-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 Fontana, see the exposure-zones guide.