Hattiesburg, MS
Hattiesburg wildfire risk explained
Out of every US place USFS scores, Hattiesburg lands at the 86th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a figure built from its 18,238 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Hattiesburg's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 88th percentile nationally.
Hattiesburg's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS classifies 34.8% of Hattiesburg's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 31.2% Direct and 34% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 18,238 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Hattiesburg against the rest of the country
There's little gap between Hattiesburg's 86th national percentile and its 89th percentile inside Mississippi, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Hattiesburg ranks 4,507 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 781 by building count (1 is largest). Within Mississippi alone, it ranks 48 of 420 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Mississippi on its state page.
Hattiesburg and the insurance market
Hattiesburg's 86th-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.
What would actually reduce this score
With 34.8% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Hattiesburg 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
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 18,238 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Hattiesburg. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Hattiesburg, see the exposure-zones guide.