Sioux City, IA
Sioux City wildfire risk explained
Sioux City's 34,304 buildings earn a 88th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Sioux City at the 86th national percentile — 2 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Sioux City's buildings actually sit
USFS classifies 75.3% of Sioux City's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 12.7% Direct and 12% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 34,304 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Sioux City against the rest of the country
Sioux City's risk sits at a similar level relative to Iowa (100th percentile statewide) as it does nationally (88th) — this place isn't unusual for its own state either way. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Sioux City ranks 3,751 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 318 by building count (1 is largest). Within Iowa alone, it ranks 1 of 1,017 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Iowa on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Sioux City's 88th-percentile, very high rating is the kind of score behind a broader national pattern: insurers pulling back from the highest wildfire-risk markets, non-renewing or declining new policies outright, most visibly in California. Shopping around, not assuming automatic renewal, tends to matter here.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Even with 75.3% of Sioux City outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones, basic hardening — gutter maintenance, ember-resistant vents — is inexpensive relative to the regional burn-probability risk noted above. Details in the home-hardening guide.
Where Sioux City's figures come from
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 34,304 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Sioux City. The exposure-zones guide covers what Sioux City's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.