Wildfire risk is not uniform across San Benito County. In the places we scored, the lowest wildfire risk score is 21.1 in Hollister, while the highest is 83.8 in unincorporated San Benito County.
We scored 152 points across San Benito County on the same 0–100 scale a Satelife address report uses, and they do not land in one place. 15% of them come out Very High, while 3% are Low. Which end your own parcel sits at is not something a county map can tell you.
FEMA NRI also rates San Benito County: all-hazards risk Relatively Moderate · social vulnerability Very Low · community resilience Relatively Moderate · annualised wildfire frequency 0.0085.
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 Benito 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 fall in the High tier, with 104 points there. There are also places in Very High, Moderate, and Low, which means buyers and owners can see very different risk levels within the same county.
For a county-wide benchmark, FEMA’s National Risk Index rates San Benito County’s wildfire risk as Relatively Moderate.
Since 1984, 36,289 acres have burned in San Benito County, and that is 4.1% of the county. The county has had 75 fire perimeters in that period.
The largest fire listed since 1984 is Rock Springs VMP (2019), at 4,410 acres. The most recent large fire is Coyote (2020).
In the longer fire record shown here, the largest named fire is Ciervo (1979) at 62,902 acres, and it was partly in the county.
Fire perimeters coloured by decade. Select a perimeter for its name, year and size.
Perimeter sources: NIFC Interagency Fire Perimeter History · largest on record: Rock Springs VMP 2019. Perimeters are simplified for display; acreage is the figure the source records.
For the two named communities in this report, San Juan Bautista has a slightly higher median wildfire risk score (50.9) than Hollister (48.5). These are close, but nearby unincorporated areas can be much higher.
A separate U.S. Forest Service product estimates modeled burn probability across the county. It shows a mean annual burn probability of 1.95% and a 90th-percentile cell value of 3.95%; it is a burn-probability model, not a fire-weather measure.
That same model indicates 99.3% of the county can burn under its mapping framework, so exposure is geographically broad even though local scores still vary a lot.
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.
This page does not include a fire-weather score for San Benito County; fire weather was not measured at all in the places we scored.
What is measured shows stronger terrain and fuels exposure outside city centers. Terrain scores run from 20.0 in Hollister to 65.0 in unincorporated San Benito County, and vegetation-and-fuels scores run from 20.0 in Hollister to 80.0 in unincorporated areas.
Hazard-zone scores also spread widely, from 10.0 in San Juan Bautista up to 95.8 in unincorporated San Benito County.
Fire weather was not measured at the sampled points in San Benito County. The other four indicators on this page were, and the bars below show what they found.
Risk varies by location, not just by town name. The highest scored areas are in unincorporated San Benito County (83.8), while the lowest scored point is in Hollister (21.1).
At the community level, the median scored risk is 48.5 in Hollister and 50.9 in San Juan Bautista. That puts both communities near each other, even though nearby unincorporated areas can score much higher.
By tier counts, High is the most common level in the county, and Very High is the next largest group. Moderate and Low appear less often among the places we scored.
Each bar is what one part of the score covers across San Benito 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 | 65 | 65 | Hollister | unincorporated San Benito County | 152 |
| Vegetation & fuels | 20 | 71.8 | 80 | Hollister | unincorporated San Benito County | 152 |
| Hazard zone | 10 | 70.8 | 95.8 | San Juan Bautista | unincorporated San Benito County | 152 |
| Fire history | 5 | 20 | 95 | unincorporated San Benito County | near Hollister | 152 |
| Composite | 21.1 | 63.3 | 83.8 | Hollister | unincorporated San Benito County | 152 |
Independently of Satelife's layers, the USFS Wildfire Risk to Communities grid puts the county's mean annual burn probability at 1.95% (90th percentile cell: 3.95%), with a mean conditional flame length of 6.33 ft. 99% of the 17,510 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 22 of the 152 sampled points — the zones cover Local Responsibility Areas. At 22 of them the USFS grid above supplied the hazard reading instead.
152 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 90%. Scores are 0–100 and comparable within the county, not across states.
At a property level, nearby locations can differ sharply, especially between incorporated areas and surrounding unincorporated land. That is why an address-level result may look different from a city median.
Fire-history scoring ranges from 5.0 in unincorporated San Benito County to 95.0 near Hollister. Hazard-zone scoring also runs high in some unincorporated areas, which contributes to the spread you see between nearby properties.
For county context only, FEMA’s National Risk Index rates both wildfire risk and expected annual wildfire loss for San Benito County as Relatively Moderate.
Find out where your San Benito 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 17 ZIP areas that touch San Benito 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 6 ZIPs
Moderate 1 ZIP
No sampled point inside 10 ZIPs
93622 · 93635 · 93907 San Juan Bautista · 93908 San Juan Bautista · 93925 Hollister · 93926 Hollister · 93954 · 93960 · 95020 San Juan Bautista · 95076 San Juan Bautista
Grouped from 7 of 17 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.
No. In the places we scored, wildfire risk ranges from 21.1 in Hollister to 83.8 in unincorporated San Benito County.
Since 1984, 36,289 acres have burned, which is 4.1% of the county. The largest fire listed since 1984 is Rock Springs VMP (2019), and the most recent large fire is Coyote (2020).
Their median scored wildfire risk is close: 48.5 for Hollister and 50.9 for San Juan Bautista.
No. Fire weather was not measured at all in the places we scored for this county. The page does include terrain, vegetation and fuels, hazard-zone, fire-history, and modeled burn-probability information.
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.
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