Welch, TX
Welch, TX's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS scores Welch at the 77th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 175 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Welch at the 71st percentile, close to its 77th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Most of Welch's buildings (68.6% of 175) fall outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones entirely — that doesn't zero out the score above, it means the risk is regional, not structure-by-structure.
Where Welch ranks
Welch's 77th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 52nd ranking inside Texas does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 25 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Welch ranks 7,326 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 25,840 by building count (1 is largest). Within Texas alone, it ranks 868 of 1,795 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Texas on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Welch
Welch's 77th-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.
What would actually reduce this score
With 68.6% of buildings rated Minimal exposure, Welch gets less benefit from structure hardening than a Direct- or Indirect-dominant place would — the home-hardening guide explains why the zone matters.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Welch's 7,326-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Welch, see the exposure-zones guide.