Memphis, TN
How exposed is Memphis to wildfire?
Memphis sits at the 54th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — modestly above the national average for wildfire risk — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 249,029 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (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 57th percentile, close to its 54th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Only 20.5% of Memphis's 249,029 buildings carry Direct exposure and 8.9% carry Indirect; the remaining 70.6% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 249,029 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Memphis against the rest of the country
Memphis scores 54th nationally and 48th within Tennessee — close enough that its state context doesn't change the picture the national number already gives. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Memphis ranks 14,416 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 17 by building count (1 is largest). Within Tennessee alone, it ranks 260 of 502 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Tennessee on its state page.
Memphis and the insurance market
Memphis's elevated wildfire rating (54th 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.
What would actually reduce this score
Memphis's 70.6% 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 Memphis's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Memphis's 14,416-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Memphis's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.