San Juan Capistrano, CA
How exposed is San Juan Capistrano to wildfire?
USFS scores San Juan Capistrano at the 84th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 11,137 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks San Juan Capistrano at the 87th national percentile — 3 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
73.2% of San Juan Capistrano's 11,137 buildings fall in USFS's Indirect exposure zone — ember cast rather than direct flame — against 9.6% Direct and 17.2% Minimal. Vent screens and roofing material matter more here than lot clearing alone. At 11,137 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 Juan Capistrano ranks
Inside California, San Juan Capistrano sits at just the 48th percentile even though it scores 84th 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 Juan Capistrano ranks 4,973 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,424 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 818 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Because San Juan Capistrano is in California, a wildfire-hazard disclosure is legally required before a sale closes here — unusual nationally, since only these two states mandate it. The state's FAIR Plan alone carried 668,609 policies by the end of 2025. Full detail in the disclosure-law guide.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Because 73.2% of San Juan Capistrano's buildings sit in the Indirect zone, sealing the ember pathway (vents, roofing, gutters) is the intervention this page's data actually supports — see the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
San Juan Capistrano's 84th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond San Juan Capistrano, see the exposure-zones guide.