North Wildwood, NJ
North Wildwood wildfire risk explained
Out of every US place USFS scores, North Wildwood lands at the 77th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a figure built from its 4,042 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks North Wildwood at the 64th national percentile — 13 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where North Wildwood's buildings actually sit
USFS classifies 99.9% of North Wildwood's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 0.1% Direct and 0% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one.
North Wildwood against the rest of the country
There's little gap between North Wildwood's 77th national percentile and its 83rd percentile inside New Jersey, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, North Wildwood ranks 7,255 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 4,196 by building count (1 is largest). Within New Jersey alone, it ranks 119 of 700 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for New Jersey on its state page.
North Wildwood and the insurance market
North Wildwood'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 Wildwood
North Wildwood's 99.9% 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
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 4,042 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for North Wildwood. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond North Wildwood, see the exposure-zones guide.