Saugus, MA
Saugus, MA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS scores Saugus at the 25th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range), a figure built from 9,892 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 Saugus at the 22nd percentile, close to its 25th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Only 3.5% of Saugus's 9,892 buildings carry Direct exposure and 27.4% carry Indirect; the remaining 69.1% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 9,892 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Saugus compares
Within Massachusetts, Saugus ranks higher (45th percentile) than it does nationally (25th) — one of the more fire-exposed places in a state that, overall, scores lower than that. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Saugus ranks 23,537 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,636 by building count (1 is largest). Within Massachusetts alone, it ranks 137 of 248 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Massachusetts on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Saugus
Saugus's moderate rating (25th percentile nationally) sits outside the range where wildfire risk alone reshapes an insurance market — still, a homeowner here loses nothing by comparing rates.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
With 69.1% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Saugus 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
Every one of the two percentiles behind Saugus's 23,537-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Saugus, see the exposure-zones guide.