Vista, CA
How exposed is Vista to wildfire?
Vista sits at the 77th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — well above the national norm for wildfire risk — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 26,289 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Vista at the 78th percentile, close to its 77th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
USFS classifies 72.7% of Vista's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 4.6% Direct and 22.7% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 26,289 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Vista compares
Vista's 77th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 36th ranking inside California does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 41 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Vista ranks 7,209 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 470 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,004 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Vista and the insurance market
Vista's 77th-percentile score lands in California, the only two states requiring a wildfire disclosure at sale. California's surplus-lines homeowners market passed 300,000 policies for the first time in 2025, driven by carriers pulling back from wildfire-exposed areas statewide. The disclosure-law guide covers what it requires.
Hardening a home in Vista
Vista's 72.7% Minimal-exposure share means structure-level hardening matters less here than it would elsewhere — still worth the low-cost basics, per the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Vista's 77th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Vista, see the exposure-zones guide.