Pasadena, CA
Pasadena, CA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS scores Pasadena at the 100th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 46,014 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Pasadena at the 99th national percentile — 1 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Pasadena's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS classifies 75.8% of Pasadena's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 9% Direct and 15.3% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 46,014 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Pasadena compares
Pasadena scores 100th nationally and 94th within California — close enough that its state context doesn't change the picture the national number already gives. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Pasadena ranks 153 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 201 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 97 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Pasadena and the insurance market
Pasadena's 100th-percentile score lands in California, the only two states requiring a wildfire disclosure at sale. California's surplus-lines homeowners market passed 300,000 policies for the first time in 2025, driven by carriers pulling back from wildfire-exposed areas statewide. The disclosure-law guide covers what it requires.
What would actually reduce this score
Pasadena's 75.8% 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.
Where Pasadena's figures come from
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 46,014 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Pasadena. The exposure-zones guide covers what Pasadena's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.