Tucson, AZ
How exposed is Tucson to wildfire?
Out of every US place USFS scores, Tucson lands at the 84th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a figure built from its 206,956 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Tucson's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 81st percentile nationally.
Where Tucson's buildings actually sit
Tucson rates 77.6% Minimal exposure against just 5.8% Direct and 16.7% Indirect — of 206,956 buildings counted, few sit close enough to burnable vegetation for USFS to flag them individually. At 206,956 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Tucson compares
Tucson's 84th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 52nd ranking inside Arizona does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 32 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Tucson ranks 5,062 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 26 by building count (1 is largest). Within Arizona alone, it ranks 211 of 441 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Arizona on its state page.
Tucson and the insurance market
Tucson's very high rating (84th percentile) puts it among the places where the national carrier-pullback trend is most relevant — not a guarantee of a coverage problem, but a reason to shop rather than assume.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Even with 77.6% of Tucson 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
Every one of the two percentiles behind Tucson's 5,062-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Tucson, see the exposure-zones guide.