Miles City, MT
Miles City, MT's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Miles City at the 84th national percentile for risk to structures, in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a score built from 4,866 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Miles City at the 83rd national percentile — 1 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Miles City's buildings actually sit
Indirect exposure is dominant in Miles City (61% of 4,866 buildings): far enough from burnable vegetation to avoid flame contact, close enough for wind-blown embers. Only 3.4% sit in the Direct zone.
Miles City against the rest of the country
Miles City's 84th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 60th ranking inside Montana does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 24 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Miles City ranks 5,111 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,516 by building count (1 is largest). Within Montana alone, it ranks 188 of 475 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Montana on its state page.
Miles City and the insurance market
Miles City's 84th-percentile, very 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.
What would actually reduce this score
Because 61% of Miles City's buildings sit in the Indirect zone, sealing the ember pathway (vents, roofing, gutters) is the intervention this page's data actually supports — see the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Miles City's 84th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Miles City, see the exposure-zones guide.