Tulare, CA
Tulare, CA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Out of every US place USFS scores, Tulare lands at the 66th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a figure built from its 21,657 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Tulare at the 67th percentile, close to its 66th-percentile risk score.
Where Tulare's buildings actually sit
USFS classifies 95.8% of Tulare's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 4.3% Direct and 0% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 21,657 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Tulare compares
Tulare ranks lower within California (24th percentile statewide) than its 66th national percentile suggests alone — a calmer spot in a state where wildfire risk generally runs high. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Tulare ranks 10,640 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 636 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,197 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 Tulare 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.
What would actually reduce this score
Even with 95.8% of Tulare 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 Tulare's 10,640-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Tulare, see the exposure-zones guide.