Thousand Palms, CA
Thousand Palms, CA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Thousand Palms at the 28th national percentile for risk to structures, close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range — a score built from 4,408 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 Thousand Palms at the 26th percentile, close to its 28th-percentile risk score.
Thousand Palms's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS classifies 96.6% of Thousand Palms's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 3.5% Direct and 0% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one.
How Thousand Palms compares
Inside California, Thousand Palms sits at just the 3rd percentile even though it scores 28th 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 Palms ranks 22,587 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,875 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,529 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Because Thousand Palms is in California, a wildfire-hazard disclosure is legally required before a sale closes here — unusual nationally, since only these two states mandate it. The state's FAIR Plan alone carried 668,609 policies by the end of 2025. Full detail in the disclosure-law guide.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Even with 96.6% of Thousand Palms 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.
Where Thousand Palms's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Thousand Palms's 22,587-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Thousand Palms's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.