Saratoga, CA
Saratoga wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Saratoga at the 79th national percentile for risk to structures, well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a score built from 12,564 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Saratoga at the 79th national percentile — 0 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Saratoga's building exposure, zone by zone
Most of Saratoga's buildings (43.4% of 12,564) fall outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones entirely — that doesn't zero out the score above, it means the risk is regional, not structure-by-structure. At 12,564 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Saratoga ranks
Inside California, Saratoga sits at just the 39th percentile even though it scores 79th 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, Saratoga ranks 6,613 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,224 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 963 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Saratoga
Saratoga 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 79th-percentile score like Saratoga's can end up mattering for. More on the disclosure law.
Hardening a home in Saratoga
Saratoga's 43.4% 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 Saratoga's figures come from
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 12,564 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Saratoga. The exposure-zones guide covers what Saratoga's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.