Job Exposure to Wildfire Risk in the American West

Increasing development in high wildfire hazard areas contributes to rising damage costs from fires. While researchers have documented expansion of residential development in high wildfire hazard areas, they have paid less attention to businesses and jobs. Yet growth in residential development and in local economic activity can often reinforce one another, and direct and indirect impacts to businesses can be an important component of overall wildfire damages. We use comprehensive data from the National Establishment Time Series Database from 1990-2020 to examine employment growth across wildfire hazard categories within 11 western US states. Our analysis finds that employment grew 0.5 percentage points faster annually, on average, in the highest wildfire hazard areas than in the region as a whole. Many of the jobs—and much of the job growth—is located within six regional “hotspots.” California has the most jobs in high and very high wildfire hazard areas, comprising 60 percent of the total jobs in these areas in 2020. Additionally, we find that jobs in the highest wildfire hazard areas are slightly lower-paying than jobs in lower wildfire hazard areas on average. We identify millions of jobs within high and very high wildfire hazard areas, motivating additional research on job disruption and workplace and employee impacts from wildfires.

Property damages from wildfires are increasing in the United States. The wildfires that struck Los Angeles in January 2025 are the most recent example and may be the most damaging wildfires in US history. Other recent examples include the Maui fires in 2023; the Marshall Fire near Boulder, Colorado, at year’s end in 2021; and the Camp Fire, which decimated the town of Paradise, California, in 2018. Until the 2025 Los Angeles fires, the Camp Fire was the costliest US wildfire on record, with property damages of $16.5 billion. That fire caused 85 deaths and destroyed almost 19,000 structures (CAL FIRE 2024).

Population growth in high wildfire risk areas is an important contributor to the problem of rising wildfire costs. Studies have shown that the number of people living in the wildland-urban interface (WUI), areas where developed lands meet forests and other natural lands, roughly doubled from 1990 to 2010, with the population in the highest wildfire hazard areas growing by 160 percent (Rao et al. 2022). While WUI growth appears to have slowed over the 2010–20 time period (Radeloff et al. 2023), approximately 40 percent of homes in the interior Western US are now located in the WUI.

Researchers have so far paid less attention to the extent of nonresidential development in the WUI, but taking stock of commercial development and overall economic activity in high-hazard areas is important for several reasons. First, damage to commercial properties in a wildfire can be substantial. Although the WUI is home to far fewer commercial properties than residential (as is true for the country as a whole), economic losses for those properties can be high if they house high-valued materials and equipment used in production or inventories of products for sale. Insured losses for the commercial agriculture and farm owners’ sector from the Northern California wildfires in 2017, 2019, and 2020 accounted for 45 percent of all losses statewide for those years (CDI 2021). The primary reason losses were so high in these fires was damage to vineyards and wineries.

In addition, studies have found that output losses from disasters—losses in production, business interruption costs, and supply chain disruptions—are the same order of magnitude as, or even greater than, the direct physical damage costs (Hallegatte 2015). Disasters can have ripple effects in local economies, with businesses feeling the effects of a wildfire even if their physical properties did not sustain damage. This is particularly true for economies that are reliant on nontradable sectors—industries that produce goods and services that are mainly consumed locally, such as restaurants, hotels, retail shops, and personal services. Jobs in these nontradable sectors are susceptible to the disruption of demand due to wildfire, as affected residents forgo nonessential services, and visitation from outside the area declines. The wildfires that struck the island of Maui in August 2023 are one example. Because the community relies heavily on tourism, the cost from impacts on businesses and jobs was high (Bond-Smith et al. 2024). Similarly, news reports on the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires noted disruption to jobs such as landscaping and housekeeping (Mayorquin and Baumgaertner 2025).

Places of employment also concentrate people during certain times of the day. If a wildfire strikes during normal working hours, it can put large numbers of people at risk. This was the case with Colorado’s Marshall Fire, which occurred on a weekday in December 2021, when many residents were at work. People trying to escape the fire and get to their homes clogged local roads (Boulder County 2022).

Perhaps most importantly, growth in population and growth in industry and jobs reinforce each other (Hoogstra et al. 2017). People move to the WUI for a host of reasons, including lower-cost housing and access to natural amenities such as public lands, but access to jobs and places to shop, dine, engage in recreation, and obtain healthcare and other services are often equally important. As households move to outlying areas, jobs and businesses often follow, and those jobs and businesses tend to induce further in-migration over time (Mockrin et al. 2023).

Given these concerns and a dearth of analysis on the nonresidential sector and wildfire risks, we take stock of businesses, commercial property, and employment across the 11 Western states of the continental US over the 31-year period from 1990 to 2020. We use an administrative database of all establishments in operation each year, the National Establishment Time Series Database, which includes each establishment’s physical location, number of jobs, and industry classification. We assess trends in job growth over time across five wildfire hazard categories and examine spatial patterns in the exposure of jobs and wage income to wildfire hazard across the West. We compare job exposure with wildfire hazard across states and identify six regional “hot spots” that have both a large number of jobs and very high wildfire hazards. We also offer a brief discussion of the distribution of job exposure by industry.

Our data and analysis reveal six notable findings:

• Growth in employment across the 11 Western states from 1990 to 2020 is greatest in the areas with the highest wildfire hazard: 103 percent, or an average of 2.31 percent per year, in these areas compared with 73 percent, or 1.79 percent per year, for the region overall.
• At 3.8 million in 2020, California has by far the most jobs in high and very high wildfire hazard areas of any state. Across the 11 Western states, it accounts for 60 percent of all jobs in high and very high hazard areas.
• The distribution of jobs across wildfire hazard categories varies across states. At 5.4 percent, California has the highest share of statewide jobs in very high wildfire hazard areas. However, Utah has the highest share in very high and high hazard areas combined at 34 percent.
• For the region as a whole, the share of wage income in high and very high wildfire hazard areas is slightly below the share of jobs: 12.5 percent versus 14.2 percent, respectively. This finding suggests that the jobs in these high-risk areas are, on average, relatively lower paying.
• When we map the locations that have the highest numbers of jobs in very high hazard areas, we identify six regional hot spots: (1) Southern California, including Los Angeles and San Diego Counties; (2) southern Oregon; (3) the Sierra Nevada foothills in California; (4) central Utah, near Salt Lake City; (5) the Denver-Boulder area of Colorado; and (6) Flagstaff-Globe in Arizona. These six regions account for 85 percent of the approximately 1.67 million jobs in very high hazard areas in the West in 2020 and 81 percent of wage income earned in very high hazard areas.
• Moreover, employment grew by 127 percent between 1990 and 2020 in the very high hazard areas of these six regions, compared with the 73 percent increase in very high hazard areas for the region as a whole. Southern California stands out among these hot spots, accounting for the majority of jobs and a large share of wage income.

Our findings begin to shed light on the trends and geographic patterns of business and worker exposure to wildfire risks in the West. The trends suggest there is some reason for concern about business location decisions, as the highest-risk areas have seen the greatest job growth. Drilling down to geographic “hot spots,” however, shows that the problems may be isolated for now to particular locales. These regional findings highlight the need to target attention to specific geographic areas where exposure is greatest but also stress the importance of prevention of new hot spots as the West continues to grow.

Analysis of the factors that affect both residential and business location decisions—for example, how access to jobs affects where people decide to live and workforce availability affects business location choices—would be worthwhile. Furthermore, policy needs to focus more attention on business decisions, especially in hot spots experiencing rapid employment growth in high hazard areas. For example, government coordination of resilience planning and policies with economic development programs, many of which offer tax breaks and other incentives to businesses to locate in particular areas, is critical (Liao et al. 2023; FEMA 2022).

The National Establishment Time Series Database provides national geolocated individual establishment data from 1990 through 2020, with the annual number of jobs at each establishment and detailed industry classification. We focus on establishments within the 11 Western states and measure wages using data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, merged to establishments by county, year, and industry. We aggregate establishments to 10-square-kilometer cells across a gridded landscape for the entire study area, and we group cells into wildfire hazard categories based on the mean 2020 wildfire hazard potential (WHP) for each cell (USFS 2024). We calculate the mean WHP for each cell and assign WHP categories of very low (<51), low, (>51 and <156) medium (>156 and <401), high (>401 and <1935), and very high (>1935) based on the cutoffs defined in Dillon et al. (2014). We measure WUI status using data from the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Silvis Lab (2024). For a more in-depth discussion of our data and methodology, see Appendix A.

Figure 1 displays the spatial distribution of 2020 WUI areas (panel A) and areas in each of the five WHP categories in 2023 (panel B) across the gridded study region. White areas on the maps are areas with no establishments. We focus in this study primarily on WHP, not WUI status. Nonetheless, it is important to point out that our analysis uses only the 2020 WUI status and does not account for changes in WUI designations over time. We also recognize that the 50 percent area cutoff for the cell WUI designation is an arbitrary one using a somewhat conservative definition of what counts as WUI. We label cells with at least 50 percent WUI area as WUI; these areas (gray in panel A) are most visibly clustered in California’s Sierra Nevada, Southern California, and eastern Washington. A comparison of the two maps shows that many WUI areas in California are also areas with very high WHP (darkest red in panel B)—that is, areas with sizeable population intermingled with natural lands and very high fire hazard.

3.1. Job Growth and Wildfire Hazard

Employment across the 11 Western states grew by 19 million jobs between 1990 and 2020, increasing from 26 million in 1990 to 45 million in 2020, or 73 percent. The geographic distribution of jobs varies greatly, with the largest share of jobs concentrated around major urban areas, such as Los Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, and Salt Lake City. Approximately 3.7 percent, or 1.7 million jobs, are in very high fire hazard areas. While this is a relatively low percentage of all jobs, it compares with only 822,000 (3.2 percent) in 1990. Thus, the number of jobs in very high fire hazard areas more than doubled over the 31-year period.

Table 1 shows the number of jobs in the 11 Western states by fire hazard category by year. Very low hazard areas are home to most jobs: 46.4 percent in 1990 and 42.5 percent in 2020. Because these tend to be mainly urbanized areas, their share of jobs far outweighs their share of land area in the region. The opposite is true for the two highest- risk categories, which account for more land area and a lower share of jobs. However, the number of jobs in the highest- risk areas has grown significantly between 1990 and 2020. Figure 2 shows this growth, normalizing employment for each fire risk category to 1 in 1990 and plotting yearly employment thereafter. Employment approximately doubled between 1990 and 2020 in areas categorized as high and very high wildfire hazard. The medium hazard category had the highest growth until 2012, but high and very high fire hazard areas were the highest after that. These trends in job growth are roughly consistent with the findings for population and housing growth in the WUI (Mockrin et al. 2023) and in the highest hazard areas of the WUI (Rao et al. 2022). However, some studies have found that population growth slowed after 2010 (Mockrin et al. 2023; Radeloff et al. 2023), which is at odds with our finding for jobs. Jobs grew at roughly the same rate in the highest hazard areas over the entire 1990–2020 period.

Approximately 75 percent of jobs across the West are in administration, education, health care, and public services; information, finance, real estate, and professional services; and arts, accommodation, and retail trade. This percentage is roughly the same across the five different wildfire hazard categories. Furthermore, these service and retail sectors show the highest growth over the 1990--2020 study period, and this growth pattern is also consistent across wildfire hazard areas. In other words, our analysis did not reveal significant differences in industry composition or growth across areas with different levels of wildfire hazard. For further discussion of the geographic patterns and trends in jobs by industry, see Appendix B.

3.2. Jobs and Wage Income in 2020

Figure 3 shows the distribution of jobs across wildfire hazard category by state in 2020. As is the case for the region as a whole (Table 1), most jobs in each state are in low and very low hazard areas because of the concentration of employment around urban areas. There are some key differences across states, however. In Oregon and Washington, the lowest fire hazard category accounts for nearly three-quarters of all jobs. By contrast, it accounts for only 13 percent of jobs in Arizona and 18 percent in Colorado. California has the largest share of jobs in very high hazard areas of any state, at 5.36 percent, but Utah has the largest share in high and very high combined, at 34 percent. Wyoming is the only Western state without any jobs in very high hazard areas, but less than 0.5 percent of jobs in Idaho, Montana, and Washington are in very high hazard areas.

Table 2 shows the number of jobs in high and very high wildfire hazard areas by state. California dwarfs all other states, with approximately 2.6 million jobs in high fire hazard areas and 1.3 million in very high hazard areas. Utah and Colorado are next, with each state having approximately 700,000 jobs in high and very high hazard areas combined.

Figure 4 plots the distribution of jobs (panel A) and wage income (panel B) by fire hazard category. They look quite similar—that is, each of the five hazard categories has roughly the same percentage of jobs and wage income. A minor difference can be seen for the two highest hazard categories combined: a slightly larger share of jobs, 14.2 percent, falls into those two categories compared with wages, 12.5 percent. In 2020, average weekly wages for the five hazard categories were: $1,290 (very low), $1,125 (low), $1,090 (medium), $1,014 (high), and $1,102 (very high). This finding could be a result of an overall lower cost of living in the highest hazard areas, which tend to be more rural, or job types that are comparatively lower paying in those locales.

In Figure 5, we provide the same information on wage income but at the state level, which can be compared with the analogous percentage of state level employment in Figure 3. Very low and low hazard areas command, on average, higher shares of wage income than shares of employment in each state. For Nevada, Oregon, and Washington, the greatest share of their wages is paid in very low hazard areas. Utah is notable for commanding the highest share of wages for jobs in high areas and very high hazard areas, corresponding to a similar result in Figure 3 for employment shares.

To identify areas that have both the most jobs and the greatest risk from wildfire, Figure 6 maps the two variables for 2020 using a bivariate color scale. WHP increases along the y-axis of the legend, while employment increases along the x-axis. Each color gradation represents a quintile in the distribution of cells for each variable—that is, 20 percent of WHP or employment. The quintile cutoffs do not quite match the five WHP categories (very low to very high). Quintile 1 corresponds to very low, quintile 2 includes some very low and low, quintile 3 includes low and medium, quintile 4 includes medium and high, and quintile 5 includes high and very high. Table 3 presents the quintile ranges for both variables. Because of the wide range of employment numbers by cell, the fifth employment quintile covers a considerable range—from the mid-hundreds to the high hundred thousands. The highest quintile for WHP includes part of the high category and all of the very high category. The purple color on the map indicate cells that fall into both the highest quintile of jobs and highest quintile of wildfire risk. Urban areas with high employment and low wildfire risk are easy to identify in clusters of green cells near Seattle, Portland, and Los Angeles.

3.3. Regional Hot Spots

Figure 7 isolates very high fire hazard areas (with positive employment) across the West, omitting areas that fall into the other four hazard categories. The color scale denotes the corresponding 2020 employment quintiles, with the darkest color representing the highest quintile and the lightest the lowest. The county groups shaded a darker gray are regional “hot spots” with a large number of jobs in very high hazard cells. We counted the number of cells in employment quintile 5 in each county in the region, selected the counties with the greatest numbers of these cells, and grouped them with neighboring counties that also contained some employment quintile 5 cells. We then selected these six regions with the highest employment numbers. California again is notable for having both comparatively high levels of employment and fire hazard. The Southern California counties account for over 1 million of the approximately 1.7 million jobs in very high hazard areas in the region. In addition to the Southern California counties, our other hot spots are in the Denver-Boulder area of Colorado (117,596 jobs), the Sierra Nevada foothills in California (94,495 jobs), southern Oregon (72,964 jobs), Flagstaff-Globe in Arizona (45,541), and central Utah near Salt lake City (42,726 jobs). The full list of counties for each hot spot is as follows: Southern California: San Diego, LA, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino; Denver-Boulder: Jefferson, Douglas, Boulder, and El Paso; Sierra Nevada foothills: Amador, Calaveras, Dorado, Madera, Mariposa, Nevada, Placer, Sierra, Madera, and Tuolumne; southern Oregon: Jackson, Pendleton, Kenton, and Douglas; Flagstaff-Globe: Coconino, and Gila; central Utah: Utah, Salt Lake, Toole, and Morgan. In total, these regional hot spots account for 1.4 million jobs, or 85 percent of all jobs in very high hazard areas of the 11 Western states.

Figure 8 compares the normalized employment growth in the hot spots over the study period with regional growth as a whole. Because Southern California accounts for the lion’s share of employment, we break it out from the other hot spots. Growth in the hot spots outpaces the growth for very high hazard areas overall: 114 percent for Southern California, 127 percent for the other hot spots, and 73 percent for the region as a whole. Southern California growth is roughly in line with that of the whole region until 2002, at which time it begins to outpace it. The other hot spots have the highest growth rate over the full period.

The hot spots as a whole have 85 percent of very high hazard area employment and 81 percent of very high hazard area wages. Thus the overall exposure of jobs and economic activity to wildfire risks is driven by these regional hot spots. The Southern California hot spot alone accounts for 63 percent of employment in very high hazard areas of the West and roughly 70 percent of wage income earned. Wage incomes in Southern California are comparatively high: $1,226 per week, compared with $925 in the other hot spots and $843 in all other very high hazard areas in the West. Together, these findings highlight the importance of the Southern California region in driving the overall job and income exposure to wildfire risk in the West. Appendix B provides a breakdown of the industry shares in each of the hot spots.

This report has summarized key trends related to the exposure of jobs to wildfire risk in the continental Western US. Similarly to previous studies focusing on population and housing growth, we find that high wildfire hazard areas have experienced significant job growth in recent decades. From 1990 to 2020, the average annual rate of job growth in very high wildfire hazard areas, at 2.31 percent, outpaced the overall rate of job growth in the West, at 1.79 percent. The higher the level of employment in high hazard areas, the more economically disruptive wildfires are when they occur. Jobs in high hazard areas are also, on average, somewhat lower paying, meaning that the workers affected by fires may be more economically vulnerable.

Importantly, we find that a few regional hot spots are the cause for the most concern. Both employment and employment growth in these hot spots, led by Southern California, account for a very large share of the West’s overall employment and employment growth in very high hazard areas. Similarly, Southern California also accounts for the lion’s share of wage income in very high hazard areas and has average incomes significantly higher than other areas. These hot spot findings, and the Southern California findings in particular, suggest a need to target immediate policy attention to particular geographic areas. They also serve notice, however, that other regions could be headed toward the same fate as Southern California if population and job growth continue in the highest-risk areas. Getting ahead of the problem by redirecting new growth to safer areas is essential.

The millions of jobs we identified in high and very high hazard areas should motivate additional research on disruption to employment caused by wildfire and the broader economic consequences faced by fire-affected communities. Research on the economic impacts of disasters is somewhat limited and focuses mainly on floods and hurricanes. The few studies that have analyzed the impacts of wildfires on jobs and income have relied on county-level data sets (e.g., Nielsen-Pincus et al. 2013; Coulombe and Rao 2025) that may not be able to identify the effects of fires with the most direct impacts on smaller geographic areas. Walls and Wibbenmeyer (2023) use a data approach similar to the one here, focusing more on direct impacts of fires to local businesses. More research is needed into the mechanisms by which effects of fires propagate through local economies to identify policies that can be implemented to mitigate economic disruption caused by fires when they occur.

Finally, our findings suggest the need to better understand business and household location decisions and to identify policies that efficiently and equitably discourage further residential and commercial development in very high hazard areas. State and local policies, including infrastructure funding, economic development programs, and local land use regulations, guide commercial and residential development decisions. A better understanding of how these policies might be modified to lower exposure to wildfire risks and enhance resilience is critical.