Madison Heights, MI
Madison Heights wildfire risk explained
Out of every US place USFS scores, Madison Heights lands at the 4th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally — a figure built from its 14,903 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Madison Heights at the 5th national percentile — 1 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Madison Heights's buildings actually sit
USFS classifies 99.7% of Madison Heights's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 0.3% Direct and 0% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 14,903 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Madison Heights ranks
There's little gap between Madison Heights's 4th national percentile and its 9th percentile inside Michigan, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Madison Heights ranks 30,228 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 998 by building count (1 is largest). Within Michigan alone, it ranks 678 of 745 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Michigan on its state page.
Madison Heights and the insurance market
Madison Heights's low rating (4th percentile nationally) sits outside the range where wildfire risk alone reshapes an insurance market — still, a homeowner here loses nothing by comparing rates.
Hardening a home in Madison Heights
Even with 99.7% of Madison Heights 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.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Madison Heights's 30,228-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Madison Heights, see the exposure-zones guide.