Prior Lake, MN
Prior Lake, MN's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS scores Prior Lake at the 40th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (modestly above the national average for wildfire risk), a figure built from 9,186 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Prior Lake at the 38th national percentile — 2 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Prior Lake rates 77.9% Minimal exposure against just 22.1% Direct and 0% Indirect — of 9,186 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 9,186 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Prior Lake ranks
Prior Lake's risk sits at a similar level relative to Minnesota (55th percentile statewide) as it does nationally (40th) — this place isn't unusual for its own state either way. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Prior Lake ranks 18,812 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,798 by building count (1 is largest). Within Minnesota alone, it ranks 414 of 914 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Minnesota on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Prior Lake
At the 40th national percentile, Prior Lake rates elevated for wildfire risk — well short of the threshold where insurers have been withdrawing coverage, though comparing a quote costs nothing either way.
Hardening a home in Prior Lake
Prior Lake's 77.9% 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 Prior Lake's 18,812-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Prior Lake, see the exposure-zones guide.