Palos Hills, IL
How exposed is Palos Hills to wildfire?
USFS scores Palos Hills at the 48th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (modestly above the national average for wildfire risk), a figure built from 5,288 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Palos Hills at the 51st national percentile — 2 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Only 2.2% of Palos Hills's 5,288 buildings carry Direct exposure and 0% carry Indirect; the remaining 97.8% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 5,288 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Palos Hills ranks
Palos Hills's 98th-percentile standing inside Illinois outpaces its 48th national percentile — this is a hotter spot than most of its own state, even though the state as a whole runs cooler nationally. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Palos Hills ranks 16,286 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,262 by building count (1 is largest). Within Illinois alone, it ranks 32 of 1,445 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Illinois on its state page.
Palos Hills and the insurance market
At the 48th national percentile, Palos Hills rates elevated for wildfire risk — well short of the threshold where insurers have been withdrawing coverage, though comparing a quote costs nothing either way.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Palos Hills's 97.8% Minimal-exposure share means structure-level hardening matters less here than it would elsewhere — still worth the low-cost basics, per the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Palos Hills's 16,286-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 Hills, see the exposure-zones guide.