Tampa, FL
How exposed is Tampa to wildfire?
Tampa sits at the 89th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 125,156 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Tampa at the 90th national percentile — 1 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Tampa's buildings actually sit
USFS classifies 78.6% of Tampa's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 14.3% Direct and 7.2% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 125,156 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Tampa ranks
There's little gap between Tampa's 89th national percentile and its 79th percentile inside Florida, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Tampa ranks 3,398 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 50 by building count (1 is largest). Within Florida alone, it ranks 199 of 955 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Florida on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Tampa
Tampa's 89th-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.
What would actually reduce this score
With 78.6% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Tampa gets less benefit from structure hardening than a Direct- or Indirect-dominant place would — the home-hardening guide explains why the zone matters.
Where Tampa's figures come from
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 125,156 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Tampa. The exposure-zones guide covers what Tampa's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.