Milpitas, CA
Milpitas wildfire risk explained
Out of every US place USFS scores, Milpitas lands at the 89th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a figure built from its 16,296 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Milpitas at the 91st percentile, close to its 89th-percentile risk score.
Where Milpitas's buildings actually sit
Most of Milpitas's buildings (76.1%) sit in the Indirect zone, where wind-blown embers rather than flame front are the mechanism USFS is scoring — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing are the interventions this pattern favors, more than defensible space alone. At 16,296 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Milpitas compares
Inside California, Milpitas sits at just the 59th percentile even though it scores 89th 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, Milpitas ranks 3,521 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 891 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 654 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Milpitas
Because Milpitas is in California, a wildfire-hazard disclosure is legally required before a sale closes here — unusual nationally, since only these two states mandate it. The state's FAIR Plan alone carried 668,609 policies by the end of 2025. Full detail in the disclosure-law guide.
What would actually reduce this score
With ember exposure the dominant pattern in Milpitas (76.1% Indirect), vent screens and roofing material tend to matter more than lot clearing alone. The home-hardening guide covers both.
More on how this number was built
Milpitas's 89th-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 Milpitas, see the exposure-zones guide.