Palos Heights, IL
Palos Heights wildfire risk explained
Palos Heights's 4,610 buildings earn a 51st-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — modestly above the national average for wildfire risk. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Palos Heights at the 54th percentile, close to its 51st-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Most of Palos Heights's buildings (97.3% of 4,610) fall outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones entirely — that doesn't zero out the score above, it means the risk is regional, not structure-by-structure.
Palos Heights against the rest of the country
Within Illinois, Palos Heights ranks higher (99th percentile) than it does nationally (51st) — one of the more fire-exposed places in a state that, overall, scores lower than that. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Palos Heights ranks 15,310 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,691 by building count (1 is largest). Within Illinois alone, it ranks 17 of 1,445 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Illinois on its state page.
Palos Heights and the insurance market
Palos Heights's elevated wildfire rating (51st percentile) isn't the kind of score driving the carrier pullback making news in the highest-risk Western markets — but a standard homeowners quote is still worth comparing on its own terms.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
With 97.3% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Palos Heights gets less benefit from structure hardening than a Direct- or Indirect-dominant place would — the home-hardening guide explains why the zone matters.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Palos Heights's 15,310-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Palos Heights, see the exposure-zones guide.