Germantown, NY
How exposed is Germantown to wildfire?
Out of every US place USFS scores, Germantown lands at the 27th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range — a figure built from its 897 buildings, not the land around them. (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 25th percentile, close to its 27th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
86.7% of Germantown's 897 buildings sit in USFS's Direct exposure zone, roughly 778 structures close enough to burnable vegetation for flame contact, not just embers — 6.5% fall in the Indirect, ember-only zone and 6.8% are Minimal.
Germantown against the rest of the country
Compare Germantown's two percentiles: 56th within New York, only 27th nationally — a gap of 29 points that marks it as unusually exposed for its own state. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Germantown ranks 23,008 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 12,750 by building count (1 is largest). Within New York alone, it ranks 567 of 1,289 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for New York on its state page.
Germantown and the insurance market
Germantown's moderate wildfire rating (27th 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
Germantown's 86.7% 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 Germantown's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Germantown's 23,008-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Germantown's dominant direct exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.