Santa Ana, CA
How exposed is Santa Ana to wildfire?
USFS scores Santa Ana at the 50th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (modestly above the national average for wildfire risk), a figure built from 60,387 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Santa Ana at the 58th percentile, close to its 50th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
USFS classifies 99.7% of Santa Ana's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 0.3% Direct and 0% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 60,387 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Santa Ana ranks
Santa Ana ranks lower within California (10th percentile statewide) than its 50th national percentile suggests alone — a calmer spot in a state where wildfire risk generally runs high. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Santa Ana ranks 15,875 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 131 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,408 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Santa Ana and the insurance market
Santa Ana 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 50th-percentile score like Santa Ana's can end up mattering for. More on the disclosure law.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Santa Ana's 99.7% 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 Santa Ana's figures come from
Santa Ana's 50th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Santa Ana's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.