Monrovia, CA
Monrovia wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Monrovia at the 95th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 14,311 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Monrovia at the 92nd national percentile — 2 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Monrovia's buildings actually sit
Indirect exposure is dominant in Monrovia (69.4% of 14,311 buildings): far enough from burnable vegetation to avoid flame contact, close enough for wind-blown embers. Only 5.4% sit in the Direct zone. At 14,311 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Monrovia compares
Monrovia's 95th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 73rd ranking inside California does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 21 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Monrovia ranks 1,661 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,047 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 422 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Monrovia and the insurance market
Monrovia's 95th-percentile score lands in California, the only two states requiring a wildfire disclosure at sale. California's surplus-lines homeowners market passed 300,000 policies for the first time in 2025, driven by carriers pulling back from wildfire-exposed areas statewide. The disclosure-law guide covers what it requires.
What would actually reduce this score
With ember exposure the dominant pattern in Monrovia (69.4% 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
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 14,311 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Monrovia. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Monrovia, see the exposure-zones guide.