Sacramento, CA
Sacramento, CA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Out of every US place USFS scores, Sacramento lands at the 71st percentile for wildfire risk to structures — well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a figure built from its 165,514 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Sacramento's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 73rd percentile nationally.
Sacramento's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS classifies 86.9% of Sacramento's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 3% Direct and 10.1% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 165,514 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Sacramento ranks
Inside California, Sacramento sits at just the 29th percentile even though it scores 71st 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, Sacramento ranks 9,067 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 36 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,116 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Sacramento and the insurance market
Sacramento 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 71st-percentile score like Sacramento's can end up mattering for. More on the disclosure law.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Even with 86.9% of Sacramento outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones, basic hardening — gutter maintenance, ember-resistant vents — is inexpensive relative to the regional burn-probability risk noted above. Details in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Sacramento's 9,067-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Sacramento, see the exposure-zones guide.