Lancaster, PA
How exposed is Lancaster to wildfire?
USFS scores Lancaster at the 6th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally), a figure built from 9,357 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Lancaster's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 6th percentile nationally.
Lancaster's building exposure, zone by zone
Lancaster rates 94.8% Minimal exposure against just 5.3% Direct and 0% Indirect — of 9,357 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 9,357 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Lancaster compares
Lancaster's risk sits at a similar level relative to Pennsylvania (3rd percentile statewide) as it does nationally (6th) — this place isn't unusual for its own state either way. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Lancaster ranks 29,739 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,752 by building count (1 is largest). Within Pennsylvania alone, it ranks 1,934 of 1,991 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Pennsylvania on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Lancaster
Lancaster's low rating (6th percentile nationally) sits outside the range where wildfire risk alone reshapes an insurance market — still, a homeowner here loses nothing by comparing rates.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Even with 94.8% of Lancaster 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
Every one of the two percentiles behind Lancaster's 29,739-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Lancaster, see the exposure-zones guide.