Milwaukee, WI
How exposed is Milwaukee to wildfire?
Out of every US place USFS scores, Milwaukee lands at the 21st percentile for wildfire risk to structures — close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range — a figure built from its 219,447 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 Milwaukee at the 24th percentile, close to its 21st-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
USFS classifies 99% of Milwaukee's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 1% Direct and 0% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 219,447 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Milwaukee ranks
Milwaukee's risk sits at a similar level relative to Wisconsin (34th percentile statewide) as it does nationally (21st) — this place isn't unusual for its own state either way. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Milwaukee ranks 24,946 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 24 by building count (1 is largest). Within Wisconsin alone, it ranks 535 of 808 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Wisconsin on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Milwaukee
Milwaukee's moderate wildfire rating (21st 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.
Hardening a home in Milwaukee
Milwaukee's 99% 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 Milwaukee's 24,946-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Milwaukee, see the exposure-zones guide.