Salt Lake City's Seismic Design Category, explained

Salt Lake City carries Seismic Design Category D under USGS's ASCE 7-16 model. High seismic hazard - this is the category most of coastal California, the Pacific Northwest, and other active fault regions fall into. Code mandates significant seismic detailing and restricts irregular structural configurations. This is the category the Brace + Bolt scope (cripple-wall bracing, foundation bolting) is built for. Nationally, Salt Lake City ranks above 95% of the 4,875 cities in this dataset for seismic hazard - the 95th percentile.

How Salt Lake City compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.695g, short-period spectral response 1.536g, 1-second spectral response 0.553g. Among 95 Utah cities in this dataset, Salt Lake City ranks 8 for seismic hazard, the 93th percentile within the state. About 217,783 people live in Salt Lake City, Utah.

What a retrofit costs in Salt Lake City

Outside California, no state-level retrofit grant equivalent to Brace + Bolt could be found for Utah. A typical retrofit still runs $5,000-$10,000 nationally, about $7,000 for a common single-family job.

Insuring against this, not just retrofitting

Outside California, earthquake coverage is typically sold as an endorsement added to a standard homeowners policy, not a separate product - worth asking about directly when getting a home-insurance quote for a Salt Lake City address.

More on how this number was built

The methodology guide covers exactly how USGS's public design-maps API produced Salt Lake City's numbers. The guide to what a Seismic Design Category actually means covers why a category is never a substitute for an engineer's assessment of one specific house.