Rio Rancho Estates, NM
Rio Rancho Estates wildfire risk explained
Rio Rancho Estates 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 853 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 Rio Rancho Estates at the 58th percentile, close to its 61st-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
99.4% of Rio Rancho Estates's 853 buildings sit in USFS's Direct exposure zone, roughly 848 structures close enough to burnable vegetation for flame contact, not just embers — 0.6% fall in the Indirect, ember-only zone and 0% are Minimal.
Rio Rancho Estates against the rest of the country
Rio Rancho Estates's 61st national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 31st ranking inside New Mexico does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 30 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Rio Rancho Estates ranks 12,361 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 13,143 by building count (1 is largest). Within New Mexico alone, it ranks 341 of 495 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for New Mexico on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Rio Rancho Estates
Rio Rancho Estates's 61st-percentile, high rating is the kind of score behind a broader national pattern: insurers pulling back from the highest wildfire-risk markets, non-renewing or declining new policies outright, most visibly in California. Shopping around, not assuming automatic renewal, tends to matter here.
What would actually reduce this score
Rio Rancho Estates's 99.4% Direct-exposure share means lot clearing around the structure typically outweighs any single material upgrade here. The home-hardening guide ranks the options for a place shaped like this.
Where Rio Rancho Estates's figures come from
Rio Rancho Estates's 61st-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Rio Rancho Estates's dominant direct exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.