Nantucket, MA
Nantucket, MA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Nantucket sits at the 27th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 7,292 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Nantucket at the 21st national percentile — 6 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Nantucket's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS classifies 52.7% of Nantucket's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 7.8% Direct and 39.5% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 7,292 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Nantucket compares
Within Massachusetts, Nantucket ranks higher (60th percentile) than it does nationally (27th) — one of the more fire-exposed places in a state that, overall, scores lower than that. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Nantucket ranks 22,936 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,347 by building count (1 is largest). Within Massachusetts alone, it ranks 99 of 248 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Massachusetts on its state page.
Nantucket and the insurance market
Nantucket's moderate wildfire rating (27th 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.
What would actually reduce this score
Nantucket's 52.7% 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.
Where Nantucket's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Nantucket's 22,936-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Nantucket's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.