Medford, NY
Medford wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Medford at the 50th national percentile for risk to structures, modestly above the national average for wildfire risk — a score built from 8,214 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Medford at the 47th percentile, close to its 50th-percentile risk score.
Medford's building exposure, zone by zone
Medford rates 73.2% Minimal exposure against just 26.2% Direct and 0.6% Indirect — of 8,214 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 8,214 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Medford compares
Within New York, Medford ranks higher (94th percentile) than it does nationally (50th) — one of the more fire-exposed places in a state that, overall, scores lower than that. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Medford ranks 15,792 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,041 by building count (1 is largest). Within New York alone, it ranks 73 of 1,289 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for New York on its state page.
Medford and the insurance market
Medford's elevated rating (50th 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 Medford
Medford's 73.2% 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.
Where Medford's figures come from
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 8,214 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Medford. The exposure-zones guide covers what Medford's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.