Pinetop-Lakeside, AZ
Pinetop-Lakeside wildfire risk explained
Pinetop-Lakeside's 3,762 buildings earn a 98th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Pinetop-Lakeside at the 97th percentile, close to its 98th-percentile risk score.
Where Pinetop-Lakeside's buildings actually sit
USFS classifies 65.8% of Pinetop-Lakeside's buildings as Direct exposure, higher than its 34% Indirect share and far above its 0.2% Minimal share — a profile where 2,474 structures sit close enough to vegetation that lot clearing matters most.
Where Pinetop-Lakeside ranks
There's little gap between Pinetop-Lakeside's 98th national percentile and its 86th percentile inside Arizona, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Pinetop-Lakeside ranks 747 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 4,462 by building count (1 is largest). Within Arizona alone, it ranks 66 of 441 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Arizona on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Pinetop-Lakeside
Pinetop-Lakeside's 98th-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
Pinetop-Lakeside's 65.8% Direct-exposure share means lot clearing around the structure typically outweighs any single material upgrade here. The home-hardening guide ranks the options for a place shaped like this.
Where Pinetop-Lakeside's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Pinetop-Lakeside's 747-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Pinetop-Lakeside's dominant direct exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.