Salinas, CA
Salinas, CA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Salinas's 35,668 buildings earn a 75th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — well above the national norm for wildfire risk. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Salinas at the 76th national percentile — 1 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Salinas's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS classifies 98.6% of Salinas's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 1.1% Direct and 0.3% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 35,668 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Salinas against the rest of the country
Salinas's 75th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 33rd ranking inside California does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 42 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Salinas ranks 7,779 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 299 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,048 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Salinas
Salinas's 75th-percentile score lands in California, the only two states requiring a wildfire disclosure at sale. California's surplus-lines homeowners market passed 300,000 policies for the first time in 2025, driven by carriers pulling back from wildfire-exposed areas statewide. The disclosure-law guide covers what it requires.
What would actually reduce this score
With 98.6% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Salinas gets less benefit from structure hardening than a Direct- or Indirect-dominant place would — the home-hardening guide explains why the zone matters.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Salinas's 7,779-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Salinas, see the exposure-zones guide.