Vero Beach, FL
Vero Beach, FL's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Out of every US place USFS scores, Vero Beach lands at the 72nd percentile for wildfire risk to structures — well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a figure built from its 7,840 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 Vero Beach at the 72nd percentile, close to its 72nd-percentile risk score.
Vero Beach's building exposure, zone by zone
USFS classifies 78.4% of Vero Beach's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 21.6% Direct and 0% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 7,840 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Vero Beach ranks
Vero Beach's 72nd national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 31st ranking inside Florida does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 41 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Vero Beach ranks 8,757 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,166 by building count (1 is largest). Within Florida alone, it ranks 661 of 955 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Florida on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Vero Beach
Vero Beach's 72nd-percentile, high rating is the kind of score behind a broader national pattern: insurers pulling back from the highest wildfire-risk markets, non-renewing or declining new policies outright, most visibly in California. Shopping around, not assuming automatic renewal, tends to matter here.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Even with 78.4% of Vero Beach 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
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 7,840 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Vero Beach. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Vero Beach, see the exposure-zones guide.