Santa Clara, CA
How exposed is Santa Clara to wildfire?
Santa Clara's 31,360 buildings earn a 30th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Santa Clara at the 34th national percentile — 4 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Santa Clara's building exposure, zone by zone
Santa Clara rates 98.9% Minimal exposure against just 0.4% Direct and 0.7% Indirect — of 31,360 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 31,360 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Santa Clara compares
Inside California, Santa Clara sits at just the 3rd percentile even though it scores 30th 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, Santa Clara ranks 22,207 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 358 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,526 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Santa Clara and the insurance market
Because Santa Clara 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.
Hardening a home in Santa Clara
Santa Clara's 98.9% 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 Clara's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Santa Clara's 22,207-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Santa Clara's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.