North Charleston, SC
How exposed is North Charleston to wildfire?
Out of every US place USFS scores, North Charleston lands at the 77th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a figure built from its 41,176 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 North Charleston at the 74th percentile, close to its 77th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Most of North Charleston's buildings (52.6% of 41,176) fall outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones entirely — that doesn't zero out the score above, it means the risk is regional, not structure-by-structure. At 41,176 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How North Charleston compares
There's little gap between North Charleston's 77th national percentile and its 77th 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, North Charleston ranks 7,192 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 232 by building count (1 is largest). Within South Carolina alone, it ranks 108 of 474 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for South Carolina on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in North Charleston
North Charleston's 77th-percentile, high rating is the kind of score behind a broader national pattern: insurers pulling back from the highest wildfire-risk markets, non-renewing or declining new policies outright, most visibly in California. Shopping around, not assuming automatic renewal, tends to matter here.
Hardening a home in North Charleston
Even with 52.6% of North Charleston 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
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 41,176 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for North Charleston. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond North Charleston, see the exposure-zones guide.