Sterling, VA
How exposed is Sterling to wildfire?
USFS scores Sterling at the 11th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally), a figure built from 5,935 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 Sterling at the 11th percentile, close to its 11th-percentile risk score.
Sterling's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS classifies 87.7% of Sterling's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 12.3% Direct and 0% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 5,935 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Sterling compares
Sterling scores 11th nationally and 2nd within Virginia — close enough that its state context doesn't change the picture the national number already gives. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Sterling ranks 28,226 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,905 by building count (1 is largest). Within Virginia alone, it ranks 671 of 681 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Virginia on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Sterling's low rating (11th percentile nationally) sits outside the range where wildfire risk alone reshapes an insurance market — still, a homeowner here loses nothing by comparing rates.
What would actually reduce this score
With 87.7% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Sterling 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 Sterling's 28,226-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Sterling, see the exposure-zones guide.