Fort Collins, CO
Fort Collins, CO's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Fort Collins's 52,335 buildings earn a 86th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Fort Collins at the 86th national percentile — 0 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Fort Collins's buildings actually sit
Most of Fort Collins's buildings (74.6% of 52,335) fall outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones entirely — that doesn't zero out the score above, it means the risk is regional, not structure-by-structure. At 52,335 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Fort Collins ranks
Inside Colorado, Fort Collins sits at just the 66th percentile even though it scores 86th 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, Fort Collins ranks 4,533 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 161 by building count (1 is largest). Within Colorado alone, it ranks 160 of 472 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Colorado on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Fort Collins's 86th-percentile, very high rating is the kind of score behind a broader national pattern: insurers pulling back from the highest wildfire-risk markets, non-renewing or declining new policies outright, most visibly in California. Shopping around, not assuming automatic renewal, tends to matter here.
Hardening a home in Fort Collins
Fort Collins's 74.6% 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
Fort Collins's 86th-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 Fort Collins, see the exposure-zones guide.