Santa Margarita, CA
How exposed is Santa Margarita to wildfire?
Out of every US place USFS scores, Santa Margarita lands at the 96th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a figure built from its 736 buildings, not the land around them. (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 Margarita at the 97th percentile, close to its 96th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Of Santa Margarita's 736 counted buildings, 54.1% carry Direct exposure and only 0% carry Minimal — a lopsided split that puts defensible-space clearing ahead of vents or roofing as the intervention worth doing first.
How Santa Margarita compares
Inside California, Santa Margarita sits at just the 77th percentile even though it scores 96th 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 Margarita ranks 1,189 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 14,256 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 360 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Santa Margarita and the insurance market
Because Santa Margarita 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 Margarita
With 54.1% of Santa Margarita in Direct exposure, defensible-space clearing and ember-resistant construction (vents, Class-A roofing) address the exposure this page's own numbers describe, not a generic checklist. See the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 736 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Santa Margarita. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Santa Margarita, see the exposure-zones guide.