Laguna Beach, CA
Laguna Beach wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Laguna Beach at the 89th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 11,397 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Laguna Beach at the 89th national percentile — 1 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Laguna Beach's buildings actually sit
Indirect exposure is dominant in Laguna Beach (90.7% of 11,397 buildings): far enough from burnable vegetation to avoid flame contact, close enough for wind-blown embers. Only 9.2% sit in the Direct zone. At 11,397 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Laguna Beach ranks
Laguna Beach's 89th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 58th ranking inside California does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 30 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Laguna Beach ranks 3,519 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,385 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 652 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Laguna Beach
Because Laguna Beach 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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Because 90.7% of Laguna Beach's buildings sit in the Indirect zone, sealing the ember pathway (vents, roofing, gutters) is the intervention this page's data actually supports — see the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Laguna Beach's 3,519-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Laguna Beach, see the exposure-zones guide.