Pawleys Island, SC
Pawleys Island, SC's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Pawleys Island at the 82nd national percentile for risk to structures, in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a score built from 507 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Pawleys Island at the 78th percentile, close to its 82nd-percentile risk score.
Where Pawleys Island's buildings actually sit
Only 3% of Pawleys Island's 507 buildings carry Direct exposure and 31.6% carry Indirect; the remaining 65.5% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure.
Where Pawleys Island ranks
There's little gap between Pawleys Island's 82nd national percentile and its 89th percentile inside South Carolina, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Pawleys Island ranks 5,622 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 17,230 by building count (1 is largest). Within South Carolina alone, it ranks 54 of 474 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for South Carolina on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Pawleys Island's 82nd-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 Pawleys Island
Even with 65.5% of Pawleys Island 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.
Where Pawleys Island's figures come from
Pawleys Island's 82nd-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Pawleys Island's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.