Palmer Ranch, FL
Palmer Ranch, FL's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Out of every US place USFS scores, Palmer Ranch lands at the 86th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a figure built from its 5,908 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Palmer Ranch at the 86th percentile, close to its 86th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Most of Palmer Ranch's buildings (71.8%) 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 5,908 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Palmer Ranch compares
Palmer Ranch's 86th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 68th ranking inside Florida does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 18 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Palmer Ranch ranks 4,411 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,915 by building count (1 is largest). Within Florida alone, it ranks 308 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
Palmer Ranch'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 Palmer Ranch
With ember exposure the dominant pattern in Palmer Ranch (71.8% Indirect), vent screens and roofing material tend to matter more than lot clearing alone. The home-hardening guide covers both.
Where Palmer Ranch's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Palmer Ranch's 4,411-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Palmer Ranch's dominant indirect exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.