Orange, CA
How exposed is Orange to wildfire?
USFS scores Orange at the 91st national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 38,894 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Orange at the 93rd percentile, close to its 91st-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Most of Orange's buildings (89% of 38,894) 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 38,894 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Orange compares
Inside California, Orange sits at just the 64th percentile even though it scores 91st 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, Orange ranks 2,858 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 255 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 574 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
Because Orange is in California, a wildfire-hazard disclosure is legally required before a sale closes here — unusual nationally, since only these two states mandate it. The state's FAIR Plan alone carried 668,609 policies by the end of 2025. Full detail in the disclosure-law guide.
What would actually reduce this score
Orange's 89% 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.
Where Orange's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Orange's 2,858-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Orange's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.