Surfside, FL
How exposed is Surfside to wildfire?
Surfside sits at the 66th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — well above the national norm for wildfire risk — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 1,313 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 Surfside at the 72nd percentile, close to its 66th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
USFS classifies 99.9% of Surfside's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 0.2% Direct and 0% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one.
How Surfside compares
Surfside's 66th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 20th ranking inside Florida does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 45 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Surfside ranks 10,864 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 10,003 by building count (1 is largest). Within Florida alone, it ranks 761 of 955 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Florida on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Surfside's high rating (66th percentile) puts it among the places where the national carrier-pullback trend is most relevant — not a guarantee of a coverage problem, but a reason to shop rather than assume.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Surfside's 99.9% 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 Surfside's 10,864-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Surfside, see the exposure-zones guide.