Ocean City, MD
How exposed is Ocean City to wildfire?
Ocean City's 7,095 buildings earn a 46th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — modestly above the national average for wildfire risk. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Ocean City at the 38th percentile, close to its 46th-percentile risk score.
Ocean City's building exposure, zone by zone
Most of Ocean City's buildings (99.9% of 7,095) 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 7,095 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Ocean City against the rest of the country
Within Maryland, Ocean City ranks higher (65th percentile) than it does nationally (46th) — one of the more fire-exposed places in a state that, overall, scores lower than that. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Ocean City ranks 16,986 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,417 by building count (1 is largest). Within Maryland alone, it ranks 183 of 527 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Maryland on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Ocean City's elevated rating (46th percentile nationally) sits outside the range where wildfire risk alone reshapes an insurance market — still, a homeowner here loses nothing by comparing rates.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Even with 99.9% of Ocean City 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
Every one of the two percentiles behind Ocean City's 16,986-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Ocean City, see the exposure-zones guide.