Wildfire risk in San Mateo County spans a wide range across the places we scored. The overall scores run from 12.0 up to 69.0, with a county midpoint of 25.0. That means buyers and owners can see very different risk levels depending on neighborhood and terrain.
We scored 178 points across San Mateo County on the same 0–100 scale a Satelife address report uses, and they do not land in one place. 32% of them come out High, while 50% are Low. Which end your own parcel sits at is not something a county map can tell you.
FEMA NRI also rates San Mateo County: all-hazards risk Relatively High · social vulnerability Relatively Low · community resilience Very High · annualised wildfire frequency 0.0016.
Sources: FEMA National Risk Index 1.20.0 (Dec 2025), county record · USFS Wildfire Risk to Communities v2.0, mean of the grid cells inside the county. Both describe the county as a whole, never an address in it.
What does your San Mateo County address score?
A county range shows the spread. Your parcel sits somewhere inside it — the report says where, and what to do about it.
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Most scored locations fell in the Low tier, with 89 locations there. FEMA’s National Risk Index rates county-wide wildfire risk as Relatively Moderate, while its county-wide all-hazards rating is Relatively High.
A separate national burn-probability view also shows that some fire exposure exists in much of the county footprint. It lists a mean annual burn probability of 0.17% and says 44.2% of the county can burn under that model.
Since 1984, 2,063 acres have burned in San Mateo County, across 28 mapped fire perimeters. That equals 0.4% of the county.
The largest fire in this county record is Cloverdale Vmp (2010), at 404 acres. The most recent large fire is Whipple (2023).
Older incidents in the fire list include Lincoln Hill (1962), which is listed as partly in the county at 3,236 acres. Several other named burns in the list are marked as outside the county boundary.
Fire perimeters coloured by decade. Select a perimeter for its name, year and size.
Perimeter sources: NIFC Interagency Fire Perimeter History · largest on record: Cloverdale Vmp 2010. Perimeters are simplified for display; acreage is the figure the source records.
Among larger cities, Pacifica is higher at 31.0 than San Mateo at 21.0 and Daly City at 18.8. That gap helps explain why county averages can feel different from street-level conditions.
Several smaller communities score much higher than many big cities: Woodside is 58.0, Portola Valley is 55.5, and Half Moon Bay is 50.9.
Lower community medians appear in Foster City at 12.0 and in both Burlingame and Brisbane at 12.8. So within one county, wildfire risk can shift from low to substantially higher over a short distance.
The score is the median of the sampled points nearest that community — a community-scale indicator, not a score for any individual property in it. Population comes from the community's own record where the source carries one.
Terrain is one reason risk changes over short distances. Terrain scores range from 5.0 in Pescadero to 65.0 in La Honda, with a midpoint of 20.0.
Vegetation and fuels also vary sharply. That score reaches 80.0 in Pescadero, while a low of 5.0 appears near Pescadero, and the county midpoint is 20.0.
Taken together, steeper ground and heavier fuels are associated with higher wildfire risk in specific communities, rather than one single county-wide pattern.
Fire-weather scores are elevated across much of the county and vary less than terrain or fuels. They run from 59.3 near Pescadero to 67.2 in Burlingame, with a midpoint of 59.6.
This page does not include any additional countywide fire-weather measure beyond those fire-weather scores. The burn-probability figures shown elsewhere are a different model output, not a fire-weather score.
Risk is not uniform from one part of the county to another. The highest scored location is in Pescadero at 69.0, while the lowest scored location is in East Palo Alto at 12.0.
By tier count, Low is the most common across the places we scored, with 89 locations.
High has 57 locations and Moderate has 32, and no scored locations are in Very High.
Each bar is what one part of the score covers across San Mateo County, on the same 0–100 scale. A long bar is a part of the risk that depends on where you are; a short one is the same almost everywhere.
The tick on each bar is the middle value. Tier boundaries — Moderate at 25, High at 50, Very High at 75 — are the faint lines behind them.
| Layer | Min | Median | Max | Lowest place | Highest place | Points |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Terrain | 5 | 20 | 65 | Pescadero | La Honda | 178 |
| Vegetation & fuels | 5 | 20 | 80 | near Pescadero | Pescadero | 178 |
| Hazard zone | 10 | 10 | 90 | near Pescadero | Pescadero | 178 |
| Fire history | 5 | 5 | 80 | near Pescadero | Pescadero | 178 |
| Fire weather | 59.3 | 59.6 | 67.2 | near Pescadero | Burlingame | 178 |
| Composite | 12 | 25 | 69 | East Palo Alto | Pescadero | 178 |
Independently of Satelife's layers, the USFS Wildfire Risk to Communities grid puts the county's mean annual burn probability at 0.17% (90th percentile cell: 0.36%), with a mean conditional flame length of 1.94 ft. 44% of the 23,374 grid cells inside the county carry burnable fuel at all.
Source: USFS Wildfire Risk to Communities v2.0 (ImageServer, county extent).
CAL FIRE has no mapped Fire Hazard Severity Zone at 42 of the 178 sampled points — the zones cover Local Responsibility Areas. The USFS grid could not read any of them either, so the hazard weight is renormalised away rather than scored as low.
178 sample points on a ~2.3 km grid, plus one at the centre of each community, weighted with the Satelife county profile v1 · median layer coverage 100%. Scores are 0–100 and comparable within the county, not across states.
For property context, hazard-zone scores peak in Pescadero at 90.0, while the low is 10.0 near Pescadero and the midpoint is 10.0. That pattern points to concentrated high-hazard pockets rather than uniformly high values.
Fire-history scores show a similar concentration: they reach 80.0 in Pescadero, with a low of 5.0 near Pescadero and a midpoint of 5.0.
Property-specific features were not measured at all in this county view. What you do have here is location-based wildfire risk from terrain, fuels, hazard-zone, fire-history, and fire-weather scoring.
Find out where your San Mateo County parcel sits
Slope, the fuel touching the structure, the road out, the fire history within a mile — measured at your address, not averaged across the county.
Free to request · PDF report with a 0–100 score, the drivers behind it, and a mitigation plan
Every one of the 42 ZIP areas that touch San Mateo County — we run address-level reports in all of them. They are grouped by the median score of the points we sampled inside each, which is a neighbourhood-scale indicator and not a score for any property: two homes in the same ZIP routinely land in different tiers.
High 7 ZIPs
Moderate 9 ZIPs
Low 13 ZIPs
No sampled point inside 13 ZIPs
94022 Ladera · 94065 Foster City · 94112 Daly City · 94132 Broadmoor · 94134 Brisbane · 94301 Menlo Park · 94304 Ladera · 94305 Ladera · 94402 San Mateo · 94555 East Palo Alto · 95006 La Honda · 95017 Pescadero · 95033 La Honda
Grouped from 29 of 42 ZIP areas — the rest had no sample point fall inside them. The community shown is the nearest mapped place to the ZIP's centre.
ZIP areas are Census 2020 ZIP Code Tabulation Areas intersecting the county boundary.
Not mostly. Low is the most common tier among the places we scored, with 89 locations, but there are also 57 High-tier locations. So risk is mixed, not one level everywhere.
The largest fire in this county record is Cloverdale Vmp (2010), at 404 acres. The most recent large fire is Whipple (2023).
2,063 acres have burned since 1984, which is 0.4% of the county, across 28 mapped fire perimeters.
No. It includes a fire-weather risk score, but it is not a forecast. It also shows a separate modeled burn-probability view (mean annual burn probability 0.17%), which is different from fire-weather scoring.
Because local factors differ. In this county, terrain and fuels vary a lot by place, and that is associated with different wildfire risk levels between communities.
A county range shows the spread. An address-level Satelife report shows where in that spread your property actually sits — PDF, per-layer score, and a prioritized mitigation plan.
Start with your address →