Northfield, MN
Northfield wildfire risk explained
Northfield sits at the 17th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 5,339 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Northfield at the 17th national percentile — 0 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Northfield's buildings actually sit
Northfield rates 87.1% Minimal exposure against just 11.6% Direct and 1.4% Indirect — of 5,339 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 5,339 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Northfield against the rest of the country
There's little gap between Northfield's 17th national percentile and its 21st percentile inside Minnesota, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Northfield ranks 26,133 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,232 by building count (1 is largest). Within Minnesota alone, it ranks 727 of 914 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Minnesota on its state page.
Northfield and the insurance market
Northfield's low rating (17th 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
Northfield's 87.1% 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
Northfield's 17th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Northfield, see the exposure-zones guide.