The Villages, FL
The Villages, FL's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS scores The Villages at the 71st national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 52,666 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks The Villages at the 74th national percentile — 3 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
Only 4.6% of The Villages's 52,666 buildings carry Direct exposure and 45% carry Indirect; the remaining 50.3% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 52,666 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How The Villages compares
The Villages's 71st national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 27th ranking inside Florida does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 43 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, The Villages ranks 9,261 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 159 by building count (1 is largest). Within Florida alone, it ranks 695 of 955 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Florida on its state page.
The Villages and the insurance market
At the 71st percentile nationally, The Villages carries the 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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
The Villages's 50.3% 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
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 52,666 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for The Villages. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond The Villages, see the exposure-zones guide.