Grass Valley, CA
Grass Valley, CA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS scores Grass Valley at the 98th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 5,513 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Grass Valley's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 97th percentile nationally.
Grass Valley's building exposure, zone by zone
Most of Grass Valley's buildings (74.7%) sit in the Indirect zone, where wind-blown embers rather than flame front are the mechanism USFS is scoring — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing are the interventions this pattern favors, more than defensible space alone. At 5,513 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Grass Valley compares
Inside California, Grass Valley sits at just the 83rd percentile even though it scores 98th 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, Grass Valley ranks 656 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,122 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 269 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Grass Valley and the insurance market
Because Grass Valley is in California, a wildfire-hazard disclosure is legally required before a sale closes here — unusual nationally, since only these two states mandate it. The state's FAIR Plan alone carried 668,609 policies by the end of 2025. Full detail in the disclosure-law guide.
What would actually reduce this score
With ember exposure the dominant pattern in Grass Valley (74.7% Indirect), vent screens and roofing material tend to matter more than lot clearing alone. The home-hardening guide covers both.
Where Grass Valley's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Grass Valley's 656-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Grass Valley's dominant indirect exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.