Redding, CA
How exposed is Redding to wildfire?
USFS scores Redding at the 96th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 38,349 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Redding at the 96th national percentile — 0 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Redding's building exposure, zone by zone
Redding rates 46.1% Minimal exposure against just 16.6% Direct and 37.3% Indirect — of 38,349 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 38,349 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Redding ranks
Inside California, Redding sits at just the 76th percentile even though it scores 96th nationally — the state's overall wildfire exposure is high enough to make this a relatively quiet corner of it. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Redding ranks 1,250 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 263 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 372 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
Redding 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 Redding's can end up mattering for. More on the disclosure law.
Hardening a home in Redding
Redding's 46.1% 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.
Where Redding's figures come from
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 38,349 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Redding. The exposure-zones guide covers what Redding's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.