Laurel, MD
Laurel wildfire risk explained
Out of every US place USFS scores, Laurel lands at the 26th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range — a figure built from its 4,371 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 Laurel at the 26th percentile, close to its 26th-percentile risk score.
Laurel's building exposure, zone by zone
Laurel rates 79.5% Minimal exposure against just 8.2% Direct and 12.3% Indirect — of 4,371 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually.
How Laurel compares
There's little gap between Laurel's 26th national percentile and its 38th percentile inside Maryland, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Laurel ranks 23,288 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,909 by building count (1 is largest). Within Maryland alone, it ranks 327 of 527 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Maryland on its state page.
Laurel and the insurance market
Laurel's moderate rating (26th 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
Laurel's 79.5% Minimal-exposure share means structure-level hardening matters less here than it would elsewhere — still worth the low-cost basics, per the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Laurel's 23,288-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Laurel, see the exposure-zones guide.