Fullerton, CA
How exposed is Fullerton to wildfire?
Fullerton sits at the 54th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — modestly above the national average for wildfire risk — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 37,437 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Fullerton at the 57th percentile, close to its 54th-percentile risk score.
Fullerton's building exposure, zone by zone
Fullerton rates 98.5% Minimal exposure against just 1.5% Direct and 0% Indirect — of 37,437 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 37,437 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Fullerton compares
Fullerton's 54th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 13th ranking inside California does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 40 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Fullerton ranks 14,614 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 275 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,363 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Fullerton and the insurance market
Fullerton 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 54th-percentile score like Fullerton's can end up mattering for. More on the disclosure law.
What would actually reduce this score
Fullerton's 98.5% 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
Every one of the two percentiles behind Fullerton's 14,614-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Fullerton, see the exposure-zones guide.