Palm Springs, CA
Palm Springs wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Palm Springs at the 94th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 23,300 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Palm Springs at the 92nd national percentile — 2 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Palm Springs's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS puts 56% of Palm Springs's 23,300 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 2.2% Direct and 41.9% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to. At 23,300 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Palm Springs against the rest of the country
Inside California, Palm Springs sits at just the 71st percentile even though it scores 94th 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, Palm Springs ranks 1,944 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 559 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 463 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 Palm Springs 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.
Hardening a home in Palm Springs
Because 56% of Palm Springs'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.
Where Palm Springs's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Palm Springs's 1,944-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Palm Springs's dominant indirect exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.