Rancho San Diego, CA
Rancho San Diego wildfire risk explained
Rancho San Diego sits at the 96th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 6,928 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Rancho San Diego at the 95th percentile, close to its 96th-percentile risk score.
Rancho San Diego's building exposure, zone by zone
Most of Rancho San Diego's buildings (45.3%) sit in the Indirect zone, where wind-blown embers rather than flame front are the mechanism USFS is scoring — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing are the interventions this pattern favors, more than defensible space alone. At 6,928 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Rancho San Diego against the rest of the country
Rancho San Diego's 96th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 76th ranking inside California does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 20 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Rancho San Diego ranks 1,285 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,498 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 378 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Rancho San Diego sits in California, one of two states that legally require a wildfire-risk disclosure at sale. California's FAIR Plan, the state's insurer of last resort, ended 2025 with 668,609 residential policies after adding 21,859 in Q4 alone — the kind of market shift a 96th-percentile score like Rancho San Diego's can end up mattering for. More on the disclosure law.
What would actually reduce this score
With ember exposure the dominant pattern in Rancho San Diego (45.3% Indirect), vent screens and roofing material tend to matter more than lot clearing alone. The home-hardening guide covers both.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Rancho San Diego's 1,285-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Rancho San Diego, see the exposure-zones guide.