Oakland, CA
How exposed is Oakland to wildfire?
Out of every US place USFS scores, Oakland lands at the 82nd percentile for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a figure built from its 114,484 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 Oakland at the 83rd percentile, close to its 82nd-percentile risk score.
Where Oakland's buildings actually sit
Oakland rates 83.3% Minimal exposure against just 6.3% Direct and 10.4% Indirect — of 114,484 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 114,484 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Oakland compares
Inside California, Oakland sits at just the 44th percentile even though it scores 82nd nationally — the state's overall wildfire exposure is high enough to make this a relatively quiet corner of it. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Oakland ranks 5,539 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 53 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 880 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Oakland sits in California, one of two states that legally require a wildfire-risk disclosure at sale. California's FAIR Plan, the state's insurer of last resort, ended 2025 with 668,609 residential policies after adding 21,859 in Q4 alone — the kind of market shift a 82nd-percentile score like Oakland's can end up mattering for. More on the disclosure law.
What would actually reduce this score
Oakland's 83.3% 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
Oakland's 82nd-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 Oakland, see the exposure-zones guide.