Madison, WI
Madison wildfire risk explained
Madison's 72,177 buildings earn a 38th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Madison at the 39th national percentile — 1 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Madison's buildings actually sit
Madison rates 84.9% Minimal exposure against just 9.7% Direct and 5.4% Indirect — of 72,177 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 72,177 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Madison against the rest of the country
Madison's 89th-percentile standing inside Wisconsin outpaces its 38th national percentile — this is a hotter spot than most of its own state, even though the state as a whole runs cooler nationally. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Madison ranks 19,558 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 106 by building count (1 is largest). Within Wisconsin alone, it ranks 93 of 808 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Wisconsin on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Madison's moderate wildfire rating (38th percentile) isn't the kind of score driving the carrier pullback making news in the highest-risk Western markets — but a standard homeowners quote is still worth comparing on its own terms.
What would actually reduce this score
Madison's 84.9% 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 72,177 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Madison. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Madison, see the exposure-zones guide.