Oro Valley, AZ
How exposed is Oro Valley to wildfire?
Out of every US place USFS scores, Oro Valley lands at the 86th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a figure built from its 21,033 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Oro Valley's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 85th percentile nationally.
Where Oro Valley's buildings actually sit
Most of Oro Valley's buildings (46%) sit in the Indirect zone, where wind-blown embers rather than flame front are the mechanism USFS is scoring — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing are the interventions this pattern favors, more than defensible space alone. At 21,033 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Oro Valley ranks
Oro Valley's 86th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 58th ranking inside Arizona does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 28 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Oro Valley ranks 4,272 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 662 by building count (1 is largest). Within Arizona alone, it ranks 185 of 441 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Arizona on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Oro Valley's 86th-percentile, very 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 Oro Valley
Because 46% of Oro Valley's buildings sit in the Indirect zone, sealing the ember pathway (vents, roofing, gutters) is the intervention this page's data actually supports — see the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Oro Valley's 4,272-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Oro Valley, see the exposure-zones guide.