Niles, OH
Niles wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Niles at the 33rd national percentile for risk to structures, close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range — a score built from 10,080 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Niles's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 33rd percentile nationally.
Niles's building exposure, zone by zone
Only 9.7% of Niles's 10,080 buildings carry Direct exposure and 24.5% carry Indirect; the remaining 65.8% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 10,080 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Niles compares
Within Ohio, Niles ranks higher (72nd percentile) than it does nationally (33rd) — one of the more fire-exposed places in a state that, overall, scores lower than that. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Niles ranks 21,218 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,590 by building count (1 is largest). Within Ohio alone, it ranks 356 of 1,264 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Ohio on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Niles's moderate rating (33rd percentile nationally) sits outside the range where wildfire risk alone reshapes an insurance market — still, a homeowner here loses nothing by comparing rates.
What would actually reduce this score
Even with 65.8% of Niles outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones, basic hardening — gutter maintenance, ember-resistant vents — is inexpensive relative to the regional burn-probability risk noted above. Details in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Niles's 21,218-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Niles, see the exposure-zones guide.