San Pablo, CA
How exposed is San Pablo to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts San Pablo at the 69th national percentile for risk to structures, well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a score built from 7,028 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, San Pablo's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 70th percentile nationally.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Only 1.4% of San Pablo's 7,028 buildings carry Direct exposure and 16.3% carry Indirect; the remaining 82.3% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 7,028 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 Pablo ranks
Inside California, San Pablo 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 Pablo ranks 9,823 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,439 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,160 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
San Pablo and the insurance market
Because San Pablo 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
San Pablo's 82.3% Minimal-exposure share means structure-level hardening matters less here than it would elsewhere — still worth the low-cost basics, per the home-hardening guide.
Where San Pablo's figures come from
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 7,028 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for San Pablo. The exposure-zones guide covers what San Pablo's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.