Rochester, MN
Rochester wildfire risk explained
Rochester's 44,248 buildings earn a 13th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Rochester's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 14th percentile nationally.
Where Rochester's buildings actually sit
Rochester rates 69.2% Minimal exposure against just 18.3% Direct and 12.5% Indirect — of 44,248 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 44,248 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Rochester compares
There's little gap between Rochester's 13th national percentile and its 17th percentile inside Minnesota, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Rochester ranks 27,325 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 207 by building count (1 is largest). Within Minnesota alone, it ranks 757 of 914 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Minnesota on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Rochester's low wildfire rating (13th percentile) isn't the kind of score driving the carrier pullback making news in the highest-risk Western markets — but a standard homeowners quote is still worth comparing on its own terms.
What would actually reduce this score
Rochester's 69.2% 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 Rochester's 27,325-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Rochester, see the exposure-zones guide.