Wildfire risk in Sutter County runs from low to high depending on location. The middle county score is 25.3, with scored locations ranging from 18.6 in Live Oak to 74.8 in Sutter.
We scored 153 points across Sutter County on the same 0–100 scale a Satelife address report uses, and they do not land in one place. 9% of them come out High, while 48% are Low. Which end your own parcel sits at is not something a county map can tell you.
FEMA NRI also rates Sutter County: all-hazards risk Relatively Moderate · social vulnerability Relatively Moderate · community resilience Relatively Moderate · annualised wildfire frequency 0.0035.
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 Sutter 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.
Free to request · PDF report with a 0–100 score, the drivers behind it, and a mitigation plan
Most scored locations fall in the Low tier (73 points), followed by Moderate (66 points). A smaller group is in High (14 points), and none of the scored locations are in Very High.
Since 1984, 3,911 acres have burned in Sutter County across 15 mapped fire perimeters. That equals 1% of the county.
The largest fire listed is the Butte fire in 2018 at 1,238 acres, and it is also the most recent large fire. Other named fires in and around the county records include West Butte (2019, 648 acres) and Myrna (2008, 455 acres).
The fire list is not ordered by date, so a lower-ranked fire can still be more recent than higher-ranked entries.
Fire perimeters coloured by decade. Select a perimeter for its name, year and size.
Perimeter sources: NIFC Interagency Fire Perimeter History · largest on record: Butte 2018. Perimeters are simplified for display; acreage is the figure the source records.
Among the named communities, Yuba City has the highest middle score at 33.5. Sutter is next at 31.2, and Live Oak is lower at 26.3.
Those community middle values can still sit alongside much higher or lower nearby locations, which is why street-level and neighborhood-level context matters when comparing homes.
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 scores are generally on the lower side in Sutter County: the middle score is 20.0, and the highest scored terrain value is 40.0 in Sutter.
Vegetation and fuels vary more. The middle score is 40.0, with values running from 20.0 in Yuba City up to 70.0 near Live Oak.
State hazard-zone scores span a wide range, from 10.0 in unincorporated Sutter County to 90.0 in Sutter.
Past fire-history scores also range widely, from 5.0 in unincorporated Sutter County to 90.0 in Yuba City.
Fire-weather scores are elevated across the county and fairly tight in range. The middle score is 64.5, with scored values from 63.3 in unincorporated Sutter County to 72.8 near Sutter.
So while terrain and fuels can shift more from place to place, the weather-related part of wildfire risk is consistently high across the places scored.
Risk is not uniform across the county. The highest scored location is in Sutter at 74.8, while the lowest is in Live Oak at 18.6.
That spread shows up in the tier counts too: many places are Low or Moderate, with a smaller set in High and none in Very High. For buyers and owners, that means neighborhood-level differences matter inside the same county.
Each bar is what one part of the score covers across Sutter 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 | 20 | 20 | 40 | unincorporated Sutter County | Sutter | 153 |
| Vegetation & fuels | 20 | 40 | 70 | Yuba City | near Live Oak | 153 |
| Hazard zone | 10 | 10 | 90 | unincorporated Sutter County | Sutter | 153 |
| Fire history | 5 | 5 | 90 | unincorporated Sutter County | Yuba City | 153 |
| Fire weather | 63.3 | 64.5 | 72.8 | unincorporated Sutter County | near Sutter | 153 |
| Composite | 18.6 | 25.3 | 74.8 | Live Oak | Sutter | 153 |
Independently of Satelife's layers, the USFS Wildfire Risk to Communities grid puts the county's mean annual burn probability at 0.33% (90th percentile cell: 0.94%), with a mean conditional flame length of 2.64 ft. 63% of the 21,535 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 1 of the 153 sampled points — the zones cover Local Responsibility Areas. At 1 of them the USFS grid above supplied the hazard reading instead.
153 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.
This county view does not measure parcel-by-parcel home characteristics such as roof type or defensible-space condition.
What it does include is county-scale wildfire exposure from federal sources. In the USFS Wildfire Risk to Communities model, mean annual burn probability is 0.33%, the 90th-percentile cell is 0.94%, and 63.2% of the county is in burnable area.
FEMA’s National Risk Index rates Sutter County’s wildfire risk as Relatively Low and its wildfire expected annual loss as Relatively Low. FEMA rates the county’s all-hazards risk, social vulnerability, and community resilience as Relatively Moderate.
Find out where your Sutter 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 22 ZIP areas that touch Sutter 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 1 ZIP
Moderate 6 ZIPs
No sampled point inside 11 ZIPs
95648 Yuba City · 95676 Yuba City · 95691 · 95692 Yuba City · 95776 · 95901 Yuba City · 95932 Sutter · 95948 Live Oak · 95950 Sutter · 95961 Yuba City · 95965 Live Oak
Grouped from 11 of 22 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.
Countywide, most scored locations are Low or Moderate, with a smaller number in High and none in Very High. FEMA’s National Risk Index also rates Sutter County’s wildfire risk as Relatively Low.
Both are the same event in this record: the Butte fire in 2018, at 1,238 acres.
Among the listed communities, Yuba City has the highest middle score (33.5), followed by Sutter (31.2) and Live Oak (26.3).
No. It does not measure parcel-level features like roof type or defensible-space condition; it reports location-based wildfire risk patterns across the county.
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 →