Palo Alto, CA
How exposed is Palo Alto to wildfire?
USFS scores Palo Alto at the 84th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 23,250 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Palo Alto's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 85th percentile nationally.
Palo Alto's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS classifies 89.1% of Palo Alto's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 7.5% Direct and 3.5% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 23,250 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Palo Alto ranks
Palo Alto's 84th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 47th ranking inside California does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 37 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Palo Alto ranks 5,067 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 562 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 831 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Palo Alto and the insurance market
Because Palo Alto 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.
What would actually reduce this score
Even with 89.1% of Palo Alto 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
Every one of the two percentiles behind Palo Alto's 5,067-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Palo Alto, see the exposure-zones guide.