Palmdale, CA
How exposed is Palmdale to wildfire?
Palmdale's 46,653 buildings earn a 96th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Palmdale at the 94th percentile, close to its 96th-percentile risk score.
Where Palmdale's buildings actually sit
USFS classifies 63.1% of Palmdale's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 7.3% Direct and 29.6% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 46,653 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Palmdale against the rest of the country
Inside California, Palmdale sits at just the 77th percentile even though it scores 96th 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, Palmdale ranks 1,159 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 196 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 357 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Palmdale and the insurance market
Palmdale 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 96th-percentile score like Palmdale's can end up mattering for. More on the disclosure law.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Even with 63.1% of Palmdale outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones, basic hardening — gutter maintenance, ember-resistant vents — is inexpensive relative to the regional burn-probability risk noted above. Details in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 46,653 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Palmdale. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Palmdale, see the exposure-zones guide.