Long Beach, CA
How exposed is Long Beach to wildfire?
Out of every US place USFS scores, Long Beach lands at the 51st percentile for wildfire risk to structures — modestly above the national average for wildfire risk — a figure built from its 128,597 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 Long Beach at the 56th percentile, close to its 51st-percentile risk score.
Long Beach's building exposure, zone by zone
Most of Long Beach's buildings (99.8% of 128,597) fall outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones entirely — that doesn't zero out the score above, it means the risk is regional, not structure-by-structure. At 128,597 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Long Beach ranks
Inside California, Long Beach sits at just the 12th percentile even though it scores 51st 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, Long Beach ranks 15,337 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 47 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,388 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Long Beach and the insurance market
Long Beach's 51st-percentile score lands in California, the only two states requiring a wildfire disclosure at sale. California's surplus-lines homeowners market passed 300,000 policies for the first time in 2025, driven by carriers pulling back from wildfire-exposed areas statewide. The disclosure-law guide covers what it requires.
What would actually reduce this score
Even with 99.8% of Long Beach 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.
Where Long Beach's figures come from
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 128,597 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Long Beach. The exposure-zones guide covers what Long Beach's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.