Reading, MA
Reading wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Reading at the 27th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range), a figure built from 8,482 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Reading at the 23rd percentile, close to its 27th-percentile risk score.
Reading's building exposure, zone by zone
Reading rates 64.7% Minimal exposure against just 9.9% Direct and 25.4% Indirect — of 8,482 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 8,482 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Reading against the rest of the country
Reading's 58th-percentile standing inside Massachusetts outpaces its 27th national percentile — this is a hotter spot than most of its own state, even though the state as a whole runs cooler nationally. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Reading ranks 23,039 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,960 by building count (1 is largest). Within Massachusetts alone, it ranks 104 of 248 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Massachusetts on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Reading's moderate rating (27th percentile nationally) sits outside the range where wildfire risk alone reshapes an insurance market — still, a homeowner here loses nothing by comparing rates.
Hardening a home in Reading
Reading's 64.7% 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 Reading's 23,039-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Reading, see the exposure-zones guide.