Kansas, OK
Kansas wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Kansas at the 92nd national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 555 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Kansas at the 94th national percentile — 2 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Kansas's buildings actually sit
USFS classifies 77.5% of Kansas's buildings as Direct exposure, higher than its 22.5% Indirect share and far above its 0% Minimal share — a profile where 430 structures sit close enough to vegetation that lot clearing matters most.
Kansas against the rest of the country
Inside Oklahoma, Kansas sits at just the 55th percentile even though it scores 92nd 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, Kansas ranks 2,682 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 16,504 by building count (1 is largest). Within Oklahoma alone, it ranks 377 of 834 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Oklahoma on its state page.
Kansas and the insurance market
Kansas's 92nd-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
Kansas's 77.5% 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 Kansas's figures come from
Kansas's 92nd-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Kansas's dominant direct exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.