Sunnyvale, CA
Sunnyvale wildfire risk explained
Out of every US place USFS scores, Sunnyvale lands at the 39th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range — a figure built from its 35,909 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Sunnyvale at the 42nd percentile, close to its 39th-percentile risk score.
Sunnyvale's building exposure, zone by zone
Sunnyvale rates 88.7% Minimal exposure against just 0.4% Direct and 10.9% Indirect — of 35,909 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 35,909 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Sunnyvale compares
Sunnyvale's 39th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 6th ranking inside California does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 34 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Sunnyvale ranks 19,213 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 296 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,484 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Sunnyvale and the insurance market
Sunnyvale sits in California, one of two states that legally require a wildfire-risk disclosure at sale. California's FAIR Plan, the state's insurer of last resort, ended 2025 with 668,609 residential policies after adding 21,859 in Q4 alone — the kind of market shift a 39th-percentile score like Sunnyvale's can end up mattering for. More on the disclosure law.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
With 88.7% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Sunnyvale 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
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 35,909 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Sunnyvale. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Sunnyvale, see the exposure-zones guide.