Los Gatos, CA
How exposed is Los Gatos to wildfire?
Los Gatos sits at the 93rd percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 12,006 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (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 Gatos at the 91st percentile, close to its 93rd-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Los Gatos rates 50% Minimal exposure against just 17.9% Direct and 32.2% Indirect — of 12,006 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 12,006 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Los Gatos against the rest of the country
Inside California, Los Gatos sits at just the 68th percentile even though it scores 93rd 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 Gatos ranks 2,225 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,301 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 498 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Los Gatos and the insurance market
Because Los Gatos 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.
Hardening a home in Los Gatos
Los Gatos's 50% 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
Los Gatos's 93rd-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Los Gatos, see the exposure-zones guide.