Yankton, SD
Yankton, SD's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Out of every US place USFS scores, Yankton lands at the 52nd percentile for wildfire risk to structures — modestly above the national average for wildfire risk — a figure built from its 6,188 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Yankton at the 51st national percentile — 1 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Yankton's buildings actually sit
USFS classifies 73% of Yankton's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 10.8% Direct and 16.2% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 6,188 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Yankton compares
Inside South Dakota, Yankton sits at just the 34th percentile even though it scores 52nd 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, Yankton ranks 15,014 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,805 by building count (1 is largest). Within South Dakota alone, it ranks 292 of 439 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for South Dakota on its state page.
Yankton and the insurance market
Yankton's elevated rating (52nd percentile nationally) sits outside the range where wildfire risk alone reshapes an insurance market — still, a homeowner here loses nothing by comparing rates.
Hardening a home in Yankton
Yankton's 73% 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
Yankton's 52nd-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 Yankton, see the exposure-zones guide.