Rock Falls, IL
Rock Falls wildfire risk explained
Out of every US place USFS scores, Rock Falls lands at the 7th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally — a figure built from its 4,533 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Rock Falls at the 7th percentile, close to its 7th-percentile risk score.
Rock Falls's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS classifies 97.6% of Rock Falls's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 2.4% Direct and 0% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one.
Where Rock Falls ranks
Compare Rock Falls's two percentiles: 35th within Illinois, only 7th nationally — a gap of 28 points that marks it as unusually exposed for its own state. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Rock Falls ranks 29,335 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,766 by building count (1 is largest). Within Illinois alone, it ranks 947 of 1,445 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Illinois on its state page.
Rock Falls and the insurance market
Rock Falls's low wildfire rating (7th 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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Rock Falls's 97.6% 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 Rock Falls's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Rock Falls's 29,335-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Rock Falls's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.