San Antonio's Seismic Design Category, explained

San Antonio carries Seismic Design Category A under USGS's ASCE 7-16 model. Lowest seismic design category. Building code requires no seismic-specific detailing here beyond ordinary construction practice. Nationally, San Antonio ranks above 7% of the 4,875 cities in this dataset for seismic hazard - the 7th percentile.

How San Antonio compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.024g, short-period spectral response 0.05g, 1-second spectral response 0.023g. Among 384 Texas cities in this dataset, San Antonio ranks 323 for seismic hazard, the 16th percentile within the state. About 1,526,656 people live in San Antonio, Texas.

What a retrofit costs in San Antonio

Outside California, no state-level retrofit grant equivalent to Brace + Bolt could be found for Texas. 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 San Antonio address.

More on how this number was built

The methodology guide covers exactly how USGS's public design-maps API produced San Antonio'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.