Germantown, MD
How exposed is Germantown to wildfire?
USFS scores Germantown at the 19th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally), a figure built from 11,741 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Germantown at the 18th percentile, close to its 19th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Germantown rates 43.6% Minimal exposure against just 20.6% Direct and 35.8% Indirect — of 11,741 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 11,741 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Germantown against the rest of the country
Germantown scores 19th nationally and 24th within Maryland — close enough that its state context doesn't change the picture the national number already gives. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Germantown ranks 25,463 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,332 by building count (1 is largest). Within Maryland alone, it ranks 402 of 527 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Maryland on its state page.
Germantown and the insurance market
Germantown's low wildfire rating (19th percentile) isn't the kind of score driving the carrier pullback making news in the highest-risk Western markets — but a standard homeowners quote is still worth comparing on its own terms.
What would actually reduce this score
With 43.6% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Germantown 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
Germantown's 19th-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 Germantown, see the exposure-zones guide.