Salt Lake City, UT
Salt Lake City, UT's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Salt Lake City's 75,163 buildings earn a 96th-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 Salt Lake City at the 92nd national percentile — 3 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
75.2% of Salt Lake City's 75,163 buildings sit in USFS's Minimal exposure zone, with only 2.4% rated Direct — risk here comes from regional burn probability more than proximity to burnable vegetation at the structure itself. At 75,163 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Salt Lake City compares
There's little gap between Salt Lake City's 96th national percentile and its 84th percentile inside Utah, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Salt Lake City ranks 1,400 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 99 by building count (1 is largest). Within Utah alone, it ranks 55 of 326 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Utah on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
At the 96th percentile nationally, Salt Lake City carries the very high rating that has pushed some carriers to limit new business in similarly-scored places elsewhere in the country. Worth comparing quotes rather than assuming last year's renewal terms still apply.
Hardening a home in Salt Lake City
Even with 75.2% of Salt Lake City 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
Salt Lake City's 96th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Salt Lake City, see the exposure-zones guide.