Solana Beach, CA
Solana Beach wildfire risk explained
Out of every US place USFS scores, Solana Beach lands at the 63rd percentile for wildfire risk to structures — well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a figure built from its 4,547 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Solana Beach at the 64th national percentile — 2 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Solana Beach rates 91.3% Minimal exposure against just 8.7% Direct and 0% Indirect — of 4,547 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually.
Where Solana Beach ranks
Inside California, Solana Beach sits at just the 21st percentile even though it scores 63rd 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, Solana Beach ranks 11,778 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,753 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,250 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Solana Beach and the insurance market
Solana Beach's 63rd-percentile score lands in California, the only two states requiring a wildfire disclosure at sale. California's surplus-lines homeowners market passed 300,000 policies for the first time in 2025, driven by carriers pulling back from wildfire-exposed areas statewide. The disclosure-law guide covers what it requires.
What would actually reduce this score
Solana Beach's 91.3% 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 Solana Beach's 11,778-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Solana Beach, see the exposure-zones guide.