Palm Beach Gardens, FL
How exposed is Palm Beach Gardens to wildfire?
Palm Beach Gardens sits at the 97th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 19,655 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Palm Beach Gardens at the 97th percentile, close to its 97th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Palm Beach Gardens rates 73.2% Minimal exposure against just 6.8% Direct and 20% Indirect — of 19,655 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 19,655 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Palm Beach Gardens against the rest of the country
There's little gap between Palm Beach Gardens's 97th national percentile and its 97th percentile inside Florida, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Palm Beach Gardens ranks 943 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 724 by building count (1 is largest). Within Florida alone, it ranks 32 of 955 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Florida on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
At the 97th percentile nationally, Palm Beach Gardens carries the very high rating that has pushed some carriers to limit new business in similarly-scored places elsewhere in the country. Worth comparing quotes rather than assuming last year's renewal terms still apply.
What would actually reduce this score
Palm Beach Gardens's 73.2% 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
Every one of the two percentiles behind Palm Beach Gardens's 943-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Palm Beach Gardens, see the exposure-zones guide.