San Carlos, CA
San Carlos, CA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
San Carlos's 10,627 buildings earn a 69th-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 San Carlos at the 67th national percentile — 2 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where San Carlos's buildings actually sit
San Carlos rates 92.2% Minimal exposure against just 7.9% Direct and 0% Indirect — of 10,627 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 10,627 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where San Carlos ranks
Inside California, San Carlos sits at just the 26th percentile even though it scores 69th 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, San Carlos ranks 9,888 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,501 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,162 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in San Carlos
San Carlos 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 69th-percentile score like San Carlos's can end up mattering for. More on the disclosure law.
What would actually reduce this score
With 92.2% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, San Carlos 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
San Carlos's 69th-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 San Carlos, see the exposure-zones guide.