Taylor's Seismic Design Category, explained

USGS's ASCE 7-16 seismic design model - the same standard building codes use - places Taylor in Seismic Design Category A: Lowest seismic design category. Building code requires no seismic-specific detailing here beyond ordinary construction practice. Nationally, Taylor ranks above 9% of the 4,875 cities in this dataset for seismic hazard - the 9th percentile.

How Taylor compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.027g, short-period spectral response 0.057g, 1-second spectral response 0.036g. Among 384 Texas cities in this dataset, Taylor ranks 295 for seismic hazard, the 23th percentile within the state. About 17,872 people live in Taylor, Texas.

Bracing and bolting: the actual cost

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.

What this means for insurance

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 Taylor address.

More on how this number was built

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