Merrifield, VA
How exposed is Merrifield to wildfire?
Merrifield sits at the 14th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 1,858 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 Merrifield at the 15th percentile, close to its 14th-percentile risk score.
Where Merrifield's buildings actually sit
Only 26.3% of Merrifield's 1,858 buildings carry Direct exposure and 0% carry Indirect; the remaining 73.7% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure.
Merrifield against the rest of the country
Merrifield scores 14th nationally and 5th within Virginia — close enough that its state context doesn't change the picture the national number already gives. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Merrifield ranks 27,150 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 7,885 by building count (1 is largest). Within Virginia alone, it ranks 650 of 681 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Virginia on its state page.
Merrifield and the insurance market
Merrifield's low rating (14th percentile nationally) sits outside the range where wildfire risk alone reshapes an insurance market — still, a homeowner here loses nothing by comparing rates.
What would actually reduce this score
Merrifield's 73.7% 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 Merrifield's 27,150-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Merrifield, see the exposure-zones guide.