Walnut Creek, CA
Walnut Creek wildfire risk explained
Walnut Creek's 22,524 buildings earn a 92nd-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Walnut Creek at the 92nd national percentile — 0 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Walnut Creek's buildings actually sit
Most of Walnut Creek's buildings (57.4%) sit in the Indirect zone, where wind-blown embers rather than flame front are the mechanism USFS is scoring — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing are the interventions this pattern favors, more than defensible space alone. At 22,524 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Walnut Creek ranks
Walnut Creek's 92nd national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 65th ranking inside California does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 26 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Walnut Creek ranks 2,641 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 590 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 547 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Walnut Creek and the insurance market
Walnut Creek sits in California, one of two states that legally require a wildfire-risk disclosure at sale. California's FAIR Plan, the state's insurer of last resort, ended 2025 with 668,609 residential policies after adding 21,859 in Q4 alone — the kind of market shift a 92nd-percentile score like Walnut Creek's can end up mattering for. More on the disclosure law.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Walnut Creek's 57.4% Indirect-exposure share points at embers, not flame contact, as the main pathway — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing rank ahead of defensible space here. Detail in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Walnut Creek's 2,641-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Walnut Creek, see the exposure-zones guide.