Palm Desert, CA
Palm Desert, CA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Out of every US place USFS scores, Palm Desert lands at the 76th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a figure built from its 25,765 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Palm Desert at the 75th national percentile — 0 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Palm Desert's buildings actually sit
71.9% of Palm Desert's 25,765 buildings sit in USFS's Minimal exposure zone, with only 1.8% rated Direct — risk here comes from regional burn probability more than proximity to burnable vegetation at the structure itself. At 25,765 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Palm Desert ranks
Palm Desert's 76th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 34th ranking inside California does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 42 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Palm Desert ranks 7,649 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 488 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,037 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
Palm Desert 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 76th-percentile score like Palm Desert's can end up mattering for. More on the disclosure law.
Hardening a home in Palm Desert
Palm Desert's 71.9% 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 Palm Desert's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Palm Desert's 7,649-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Palm Desert's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.