The exposure a risk carries before any action has been taken to manage it, scored on the same likelihood and impact scale as the residual score it is compared against.
Inherent risk is scored as though nothing were being done about the risk: no response, no mitigation, no control standing in the way. It exists so the residual score has something to be measured against, because a single number cannot show whether anything is working. Scoring it honestly is harder than it looks, since most risks inside a running organisation already sit behind procurement rules, access controls and approval gates that nobody would genuinely switch off, which is why some registers record a current score in its place. Once set, an inherent score belongs to the risk rather than to your progress against it, so it moves only when the underlying exposure does.
Where this comes up
One bar per variable, the widest at the top, all of them measured against a baseline down the middle. A tornado diagram ranks what could move an outcome, and by how much.
A risk might happen. An issue already has. That single difference decides which artefact a line belongs in, what you record about it, and who you have to tell.
Contingency reserve sits inside the cost baseline, for risks already named and priced. Management reserve sits above it, for the ones nobody named. Level and authority, not size.
Most risk registers record one number per row. The number that actually justifies spending money is the distance between two of them.