Hickory, NC
Hickory wildfire risk explained
Out of every US place USFS scores, Hickory lands at the 35th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range — a figure built from its 16,368 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 Hickory at the 38th percentile, close to its 35th-percentile risk score.
Hickory's building exposure, zone by zone
Only 28.9% of Hickory's 16,368 buildings carry Direct exposure and 6.1% carry Indirect; the remaining 65% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 16,368 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Hickory compares
Hickory's 35th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 7th ranking inside North Carolina does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 28 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Hickory ranks 20,490 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 887 by building count (1 is largest). Within North Carolina alone, it ranks 716 of 772 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for North Carolina on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Hickory's moderate wildfire rating (35th 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
Even with 65% of Hickory outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones, basic hardening — gutter maintenance, ember-resistant vents — is inexpensive relative to the regional burn-probability risk noted above. Details in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 16,368 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Hickory. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Hickory, see the exposure-zones guide.