Winter Gardens, CA
Winter Gardens wildfire risk explained
Out of every US place USFS scores, Winter Gardens lands at the 89th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a figure built from its 6,842 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Winter Gardens at the 87th national percentile — 1 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Winter Gardens's buildings actually sit
Only 10.6% of Winter Gardens's 6,842 buildings carry Direct exposure and 28.5% carry Indirect; the remaining 60.9% are Minimal, which shifts the risk driving this page's score toward the surrounding landscape rather than any one structure. At 6,842 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Winter Gardens ranks
Inside California, Winter Gardens sits at just the 58th percentile even though it scores 89th nationally — the state's overall wildfire exposure is high enough to make this a relatively quiet corner of it. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Winter Gardens ranks 3,553 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,531 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 659 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Winter Gardens and the insurance market
Winter Gardens 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 89th-percentile score like Winter Gardens's can end up mattering for. More on the disclosure law.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Winter Gardens's 60.9% 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.
Where Winter Gardens's figures come from
Winter Gardens's 89th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Winter Gardens's dominant minimal exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.