Salado, TX
Salado, TX's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Salado's 1,424 buildings earn a 81st-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Salado at the 79th national percentile — 2 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Salado's buildings actually sit
USFS classifies 62.6% of Salado's buildings as Direct exposure, higher than its 37.4% Indirect share and far above its 0% Minimal share — a profile where 891 structures sit close enough to vegetation that lot clearing matters most.
How Salado compares
Inside Texas, Salado sits at just the 64th percentile even though it scores 81st 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, Salado ranks 5,999 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 9,514 by building count (1 is largest). Within Texas alone, it ranks 650 of 1,795 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Texas on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Salado's 81st-percentile, very 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
Salado's 62.6% 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.
More on how this number was built
Salado's 81st-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Salado, see the exposure-zones guide.