Temecula, CA
How exposed is Temecula to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Temecula at the 99th national percentile for risk to structures, in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a score built from 34,024 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Temecula at the 98th percentile, close to its 99th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Only 8% of Temecula's 34,024 buildings carry Direct exposure and 33.6% carry Indirect; the remaining 58.4% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 34,024 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Temecula compares
Temecula's risk sits at a similar level relative to California (88th percentile statewide) as it does nationally (99th) — this place isn't unusual for its own state either way. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Temecula ranks 408 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 319 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 198 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Temecula and the insurance market
Temecula's 99th-percentile score lands in California, the only two states requiring a wildfire disclosure at sale. California's surplus-lines homeowners market passed 300,000 policies for the first time in 2025, driven by carriers pulling back from wildfire-exposed areas statewide. The disclosure-law guide covers what it requires.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Even with 58.4% of Temecula outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones, basic hardening — gutter maintenance, ember-resistant vents — is inexpensive relative to the regional burn-probability risk noted above. Details in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Temecula's 99th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Temecula, see the exposure-zones guide.