Wheat Ridge, CO
Wheat Ridge, CO's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Wheat Ridge at the 58th national percentile for risk to structures, modestly above the national average for wildfire risk — a score built from 12,862 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Wheat Ridge at the 59th percentile, close to its 58th-percentile risk score.
Wheat Ridge's building exposure, zone by zone
Only 7.5% of Wheat Ridge's 12,862 buildings carry Direct exposure and 0% carry Indirect; the remaining 92.5% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 12,862 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Wheat Ridge ranks
Wheat Ridge ranks lower within Colorado (26th percentile statewide) than its 58th national percentile suggests alone — a calmer spot in a state where wildfire risk generally runs high. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Wheat Ridge ranks 13,262 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,184 by building count (1 is largest). Within Colorado alone, it ranks 348 of 472 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Colorado on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Wheat Ridge
Wheat Ridge's elevated wildfire rating (58th percentile) isn't the kind of score driving the carrier pullback making news in the highest-risk Western markets — but a standard homeowners quote is still worth comparing on its own terms.
What would actually reduce this score
Wheat Ridge's 92.5% 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
Every one of the two percentiles behind Wheat Ridge's 13,262-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Wheat Ridge, see the exposure-zones guide.