Sikeston, MO
Sikeston wildfire risk explained
Sikeston sits at the 4th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 7,929 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 Sikeston at the 5th percentile, close to its 4th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Only 10.3% of Sikeston's 7,929 buildings carry Direct exposure and 0% carry Indirect; the remaining 89.8% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 7,929 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Sikeston compares
Sikeston scores 4th nationally and 4th within Missouri — close enough that its state context doesn't change the picture the national number already gives. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Sikeston ranks 30,231 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,137 by building count (1 is largest). Within Missouri alone, it ranks 1,019 of 1,062 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Missouri on its state page.
Sikeston and the insurance market
Sikeston's low rating (4th 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
Sikeston's 89.8% 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 Sikeston's 30,231-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Sikeston, see the exposure-zones guide.