North Topsail Beach, NC
North Topsail Beach wildfire risk explained
Out of every US place USFS scores, North Topsail Beach lands at the 83rd percentile for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a figure built from its 1,627 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 Topsail Beach at the 78th percentile, close to its 83rd-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
USFS classifies 69.8% of North Topsail Beach's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 13.6% Direct and 16.7% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one.
How North Topsail Beach compares
There's little gap between North Topsail Beach's 83rd national percentile and its 90th percentile inside North Carolina, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, North Topsail Beach ranks 5,391 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 8,666 by building count (1 is largest). Within North Carolina alone, it ranks 77 of 772 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for North Carolina on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in North Topsail Beach
North Topsail Beach's very high rating (83rd 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
North Topsail Beach's 69.8% 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 North Topsail Beach's 5,391-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond North Topsail Beach, see the exposure-zones guide.