Lutz, FL
Lutz wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Lutz at the 86th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 9,882 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 Lutz at the 86th percentile, close to its 86th-percentile risk score.
Where Lutz's buildings actually sit
Of Lutz's 9,882 counted buildings, 66.6% carry Direct exposure and only 13.6% carry Minimal — a lopsided split that puts defensible-space clearing ahead of vents or roofing as the intervention worth doing first. At 9,882 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Lutz ranks
Lutz's 86th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 67th ranking inside Florida does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 19 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Lutz ranks 4,569 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,641 by building count (1 is largest). Within Florida alone, it ranks 320 of 955 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Florida on its state page.
Lutz and the insurance market
Lutz's 86th-percentile, very high rating is the kind of score behind a broader national pattern: insurers pulling back from the highest wildfire-risk markets, non-renewing or declining new policies outright, most visibly in California. Shopping around, not assuming automatic renewal, tends to matter here.
What would actually reduce this score
Lutz's 66.6% 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.
Where Lutz's figures come from
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 9,882 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Lutz. The exposure-zones guide covers what Lutz's dominant direct exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.