Melbourne, FL
Melbourne wildfire risk explained
Out of every US place USFS scores, Melbourne lands at the 94th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a figure built from its 32,370 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Melbourne at the 94th percentile, close to its 94th-percentile risk score.
Melbourne's building exposure, zone by zone
Only 7.3% of Melbourne's 32,370 buildings carry Direct exposure and 3.9% carry Indirect; the remaining 88.8% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 32,370 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Melbourne compares
There's little gap between Melbourne's 94th national percentile and its 91st percentile inside Florida, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Melbourne ranks 1,823 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 339 by building count (1 is largest). Within Florida alone, it ranks 92 of 955 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Florida on its state page.
Melbourne and the insurance market
At the 94th percentile nationally, Melbourne carries the very high rating that has pushed some carriers to limit new business in similarly-scored places elsewhere in the country. Worth comparing quotes rather than assuming last year's renewal terms still apply.
What would actually reduce this score
With 88.8% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Melbourne gets less benefit from structure hardening than a Direct- or Indirect-dominant place would — the home-hardening guide explains why the zone matters.
Where Melbourne's figures come from
Melbourne's 94th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Melbourne's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.