Sauk Centre, MN
Sauk Centre, MN's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Sauk Centre sits at the 46th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — modestly above the national average for wildfire risk — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 2,380 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Sauk Centre at the 43rd percentile, close to its 46th-percentile risk score.
Sauk Centre's building exposure, zone by zone
Sauk Centre rates 74.8% Minimal exposure against just 11.3% Direct and 13.9% Indirect — of 2,380 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually.
How Sauk Centre compares
Within Minnesota, Sauk Centre ranks higher (67th percentile) than it does nationally (46th) — one of the more fire-exposed places in a state that, overall, scores lower than that. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Sauk Centre ranks 17,083 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 6,549 by building count (1 is largest). Within Minnesota alone, it ranks 302 of 914 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Minnesota on its state page.
Sauk Centre and the insurance market
At the 46th national percentile, Sauk Centre rates elevated for wildfire risk — well short of the threshold where insurers have been withdrawing coverage, though comparing a quote costs nothing either way.
What would actually reduce this score
Sauk Centre's 74.8% 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.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Sauk Centre's 17,083-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Sauk Centre, see the exposure-zones guide.