Los Banos, CA
How exposed is Los Banos to wildfire?
USFS scores Los Banos at the 74th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 12,765 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (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 Banos at the 73rd percentile, close to its 74th-percentile risk score.
Where Los Banos's buildings actually sit
USFS classifies 71.1% of Los Banos's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 3.4% Direct and 25.5% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 12,765 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Los Banos ranks
Los Banos ranks lower within California (32nd percentile statewide) than its 74th national percentile suggests alone — a calmer spot in a state where wildfire risk generally runs high. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Los Banos ranks 8,215 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,196 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,072 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Los Banos
Los Banos's 74th-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
Los Banos's 71.1% 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
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 12,765 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Los Banos. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Los Banos, see the exposure-zones guide.