Thousand Oaks, CA
Thousand Oaks wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Thousand Oaks at the 85th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally), a figure built from 39,306 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Thousand Oaks's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 82nd percentile nationally.
Where Thousand Oaks's buildings actually sit
Most of Thousand Oaks's buildings (74.4%) sit in the Indirect zone, where wind-blown embers rather than flame front are the mechanism USFS is scoring — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing are the interventions this pattern favors, more than defensible space alone. At 39,306 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Thousand Oaks compares
Inside California, Thousand Oaks sits at just the 51st percentile even though it scores 85th nationally — the state's overall wildfire exposure is high enough to make this a relatively quiet corner of it. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Thousand Oaks ranks 4,625 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 251 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 776 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Thousand Oaks and the insurance market
Thousand Oaks sits in California, one of two states that legally require a wildfire-risk disclosure at sale. California's FAIR Plan, the state's insurer of last resort, ended 2025 with 668,609 residential policies after adding 21,859 in Q4 alone — the kind of market shift a 85th-percentile score like Thousand Oaks's can end up mattering for. More on the disclosure law.
Hardening a home in Thousand Oaks
Thousand Oaks's 74.4% Indirect-exposure share points at embers, not flame contact, as the main pathway — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing rank ahead of defensible space here. Detail in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 39,306 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Thousand Oaks. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Thousand Oaks, see the exposure-zones guide.