Gainesville, FL
Gainesville wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Gainesville at the 84th national percentile for risk to structures, in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a score built from 35,079 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Gainesville at the 81st percentile, close to its 84th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
54.4% of Gainesville's 35,079 buildings sit in USFS's Direct exposure zone, roughly 19,097 structures close enough to burnable vegetation for flame contact, not just embers — 24% fall in the Indirect, ember-only zone and 21.6% are Minimal. At 35,079 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Gainesville against the rest of the country
Inside Florida, Gainesville sits at just the 61st percentile even though it scores 84th 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, Gainesville ranks 4,975 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 307 by building count (1 is largest). Within Florida alone, it ranks 372 of 955 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Florida on its state page.
Gainesville and the insurance market
Gainesville's 84th-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 Gainesville
Gainesville's 54.4% Direct-exposure share means lot clearing around the structure typically outweighs any single material upgrade here. The home-hardening guide ranks the options for a place shaped like this.
Where Gainesville's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Gainesville's 4,975-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Gainesville's dominant direct exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.