Fort Myers, FL
How exposed is Fort Myers to wildfire?
Out of every US place USFS scores, Fort Myers lands at the 89th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a figure built from its 26,091 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Fort Myers at the 88th national percentile — 0 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Fort Myers's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS classifies 65.8% of Fort Myers's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 14.6% Direct and 19.6% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 26,091 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Fort Myers compares
Fort Myers scores 89th nationally and 76th within Florida — close enough that its state context doesn't change the picture the national number already gives. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Fort Myers ranks 3,617 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 478 by building count (1 is largest). Within Florida alone, it ranks 225 of 955 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Florida on its state page.
Fort Myers and the insurance market
Fort Myers's 89th-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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
With 65.8% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Fort Myers gets less benefit from structure hardening than a Direct- or Indirect-dominant place would — the home-hardening guide explains why the zone matters.
Where Fort Myers's figures come from
Fort Myers's 89th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Fort Myers's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.