Tavares, FL
Tavares wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Tavares at the 81st national percentile for risk to structures, in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a score built from 8,589 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Tavares at the 82nd national percentile — 1 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
USFS classifies 64.1% of Tavares's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 18.3% Direct and 17.6% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 8,589 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Tavares against the rest of the country
Tavares's 81st national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 50th ranking inside Florida does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 31 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Tavares ranks 6,048 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,937 by building count (1 is largest). Within Florida alone, it ranks 475 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
At the 81st percentile nationally, Tavares carries the very high rating that has pushed some carriers to limit new business in similarly-scored places elsewhere in the country. Worth comparing quotes rather than assuming last year's renewal terms still apply.
What would actually reduce this score
Tavares's 64.1% 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 Tavares's 6,048-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Tavares, see the exposure-zones guide.