Rancho Palos Verdes, CA
Rancho Palos Verdes wildfire risk explained
Rancho Palos Verdes sits at the 61st percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — well above the national norm for wildfire risk — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 14,713 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Rancho Palos Verdes at the 62nd national percentile — 1 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Most of Rancho Palos Verdes's buildings (53.3% of 14,713) fall outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones entirely — that doesn't zero out the score above, it means the risk is regional, not structure-by-structure. At 14,713 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Rancho Palos Verdes compares
Rancho Palos Verdes's 61st national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 19th ranking inside California does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 42 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Rancho Palos Verdes ranks 12,154 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,009 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,265 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Rancho Palos Verdes and the insurance market
Rancho Palos Verdes's 61st-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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Rancho Palos Verdes's 53.3% 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 Rancho Palos Verdes's 12,154-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Rancho Palos Verdes, see the exposure-zones guide.