Los Altos Hills, CA
Los Altos Hills, CA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Los Altos Hills at the 77th national percentile for risk to structures, well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a score built from 4,446 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Los Altos Hills at the 78th percentile, close to its 77th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
4,446 buildings are counted in Los Altos Hills, and 66.1% of them sit in USFS's Direct exposure zone — flame contact, not just ember cast, is the live possibility for most of them, against 14.6% rated Minimal.
Los Altos Hills against the rest of the country
Inside California, Los Altos Hills sits at just the 36th percentile even though it scores 77th 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, Los Altos Hills ranks 7,207 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,840 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,002 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Los Altos Hills
Because Los Altos Hills 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.
What would actually reduce this score
Los Altos Hills's 66.1% 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.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Los Altos Hills's 7,207-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Los Altos Hills, see the exposure-zones guide.