Millbrae, CA
Millbrae wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Millbrae at the 71st national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 6,515 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Millbrae at the 70th percentile, close to its 71st-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
USFS puts 51.8% of Millbrae's 6,515 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 3.9% Direct and 44.4% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to. At 6,515 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Millbrae against the rest of the country
Inside California, Millbrae sits at just the 29th percentile even though it scores 71st nationally — the state's overall wildfire exposure is high enough to make this a relatively quiet corner of it. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Millbrae ranks 9,037 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,666 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,114 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Millbrae sits in California, one of two states that legally require a wildfire-risk disclosure at sale. California's FAIR Plan, the state's insurer of last resort, ended 2025 with 668,609 residential policies after adding 21,859 in Q4 alone — the kind of market shift a 71st-percentile score like Millbrae's can end up mattering for. More on the disclosure law.
What would actually reduce this score
With ember exposure the dominant pattern in Millbrae (51.8% Indirect), vent screens and roofing material tend to matter more than lot clearing alone. The home-hardening guide covers both.
Where Millbrae's figures come from
Millbrae's 71st-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 Millbrae's dominant indirect exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.