Memphis, FL
Memphis wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Memphis at the 72nd national percentile for risk to structures, well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a score built from 3,580 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 Memphis at the 73rd percentile, close to its 72nd-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
85.1% of Memphis's 3,580 buildings sit in USFS's Minimal exposure zone, with only 14.9% rated Direct — risk here comes from regional burn probability more than proximity to burnable vegetation at the structure itself.
How Memphis compares
Memphis ranks lower within Florida (30th percentile statewide) than its 72nd national percentile suggests alone — a calmer spot in a state where wildfire risk generally runs high. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Memphis ranks 8,912 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 4,678 by building count (1 is largest). Within Florida alone, it ranks 671 of 955 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Florida on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Memphis
Memphis's 72nd-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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Memphis's 85.1% 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
Every one of the two percentiles behind Memphis's 8,912-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Memphis, see the exposure-zones guide.