WildfireRiskFinder

Myrtle Beach, SC

Myrtle Beach, SC's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers

High
79thpercentile nationally

Myrtle Beach's 14,183 buildings earn a 79th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — well above the national norm for wildfire risk. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)

USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Myrtle Beach at the 72nd percentile, close to its 79th-percentile risk score.

Where Myrtle Beach's buildings actually sit

14,183Total buildings
12.9%Direct exposure
2.9%Indirect exposure
84.2%Minimal exposure

Only 12.9% of Myrtle Beach's 14,183 buildings carry Direct exposure and 2.9% carry Indirect; the remaining 84.2% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 14,183 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.

How Myrtle Beach compares

There's little gap between Myrtle Beach's 79th national percentile and its 81st percentile inside South Carolina, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Myrtle Beach ranks 6,629 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,057 by building count (1 is largest). Within South Carolina alone, it ranks 89 of 474 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for South Carolina on its state page.

What this risk score means for insurance

Myrtle Beach's high rating (79th percentile) puts it among the places where the national carrier-pullback trend is most relevant — not a guarantee of a coverage problem, but a reason to shop rather than assume.

Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it

Myrtle Beach's 84.2% 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 Myrtle Beach's 6,629-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Myrtle Beach, see the exposure-zones guide.