Payson, UT
Payson wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Payson at the 91st national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 6,789 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Payson at the 89th national percentile — 3 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Payson's building exposure, zone by zone
56.1% of Payson's 6,789 buildings fall in USFS's Indirect exposure zone — ember cast rather than direct flame — against 12.8% Direct and 31% Minimal. Vent screens and roofing material matter more here than lot clearing alone. At 6,789 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Payson against the rest of the country
Inside Utah, Payson sits at just the 61st percentile even though it scores 91st nationally — the state's overall wildfire exposure is high enough to make this a relatively quiet corner of it. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Payson ranks 2,788 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,547 by building count (1 is largest). Within Utah alone, it ranks 127 of 326 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Utah on its state page.
Payson and the insurance market
Payson's 91st-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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Because 56.1% of Payson's buildings sit in the Indirect zone, sealing the ember pathway (vents, roofing, gutters) is the intervention this page's data actually supports — see the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 6,789 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Payson. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Payson, see the exposure-zones guide.