Margate, FL
How exposed is Margate to wildfire?
USFS scores Margate at the 65th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 14,072 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 Margate at the 69th percentile, close to its 65th-percentile risk score.
Where Margate's buildings actually sit
Margate rates 97.3% Minimal exposure against just 2.7% Direct and 0% Indirect — of 14,072 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 14,072 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Margate ranks
Inside Florida, Margate sits at just the 19th percentile even though it scores 65th 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, Margate ranks 11,052 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,067 by building count (1 is largest). Within Florida alone, it ranks 769 of 955 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Florida on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Margate
Margate's 65th-percentile, 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.
Hardening a home in Margate
Margate's 97.3% 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
Margate's 65th-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 Margate, see the exposure-zones guide.