Santa Barbara, CA
How exposed is Santa Barbara to wildfire?
USFS scores Santa Barbara at the 94th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 27,234 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Santa Barbara's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 92nd percentile nationally.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Only 18% of Santa Barbara's 27,234 buildings carry Direct exposure and 17.7% carry Indirect; the remaining 64.4% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 27,234 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 Barbara ranks
Santa Barbara's 94th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 71st ranking inside California does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 23 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Santa Barbara ranks 1,882 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 452 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 454 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Santa Barbara and the insurance market
Santa Barbara 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 94th-percentile score like Santa Barbara's can end up mattering for. More on the disclosure law.
What would actually reduce this score
With 64.4% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Santa Barbara 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
Santa Barbara's 94th-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 Santa Barbara, see the exposure-zones guide.