Marathon, FL
How exposed is Marathon to wildfire?
Out of every US place USFS scores, Marathon lands at the 47th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — modestly above the national average for wildfire risk — a figure built from its 5,327 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Marathon at the 47th national percentile — 0 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Marathon's building exposure, zone by zone
Only 6% of Marathon's 5,327 buildings carry Direct exposure and 0% carry Indirect; the remaining 94% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 5,327 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Marathon compares
Marathon's 47th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 2nd ranking inside Florida does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 45 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Marathon ranks 16,600 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,242 by building count (1 is largest). Within Florida alone, it ranks 934 of 955 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Florida on its state page.
Marathon and the insurance market
Marathon's elevated wildfire rating (47th 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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
With 94% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Marathon gets less benefit from structure hardening than a Direct- or Indirect-dominant place would — the home-hardening guide explains why the zone matters.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Marathon's 16,600-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Marathon, see the exposure-zones guide.