How to Determine Your Home's Fire Score
Insurers score your home's wildfire risk from its location, vegetation, and building materials, often using a state wildfire risk portal.
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What the score weighs
The score looks at your home's distance to wildland vegetation, the slope of the land around it, the roofing and siding materials, and local fire history. A wood roof or dense brush near the house pushes the score higher even if your house has never burned.
Who calculates it
Insurers use wildfire modeling companies or state-run risk portals to score your address, not a visit from an adjuster. Some states let homeowners look up their own property's rating through one of these public portals, which can explain a non-renewal that otherwise seems to come out of nowhere.
What you can change
Clearing brush within a few feet of the house, replacing a wood shake roof, and removing overhanging branches can lower a property's score over time. Ask the new insurer, or the state portal if one exists, which specific factors on your address are driving the rating up.
Why it affects your options
A high fire score can shrink the number of insurers willing to write the policy, which is often why the cancellation or non-renewal letter arrived in the first place. Some states run a FAIR Plan as a backup for homes insurers won't otherwise cover.
A high score with one insurer isn't a high score everywhere
Insurers weigh fire risk differently, so the company that dropped you isn't the only measure of your address. Comparing quotes shows whether another insurer rates your home, and your mitigation work, differently.
How long does a fire score stay against your house
A fire score isn't permanent. It's a snapshot built from conditions at the time an insurer or a modeling company pulled data on your address, and those conditions change. A dry summer that thins the brush around your property, a new fire station built two miles away, or a wildfire that burned through nearby fuel can all shift the number, up or down, the next time someone runs the model.
Insurers typically re-run these scores at renewal, not continuously, so a property that gets rated high in one cycle isn't locked into that rating for good. If you've done the work, cleared defensible space, replaced a wood roof, removed a dead tree hanging over the house, that work doesn't automatically update the score sitting in some insurer's file. You may need to tell a new insurer about it directly, since the modeling companies don't always know about improvements made after their last data pull.
Keep records of what you've changed. Dated photos of cleared brush, a receipt for the new roof, a contractor's invoice for removing overhanging limbs. None of this is required paperwork the way a home inspection is, but when an underwriter is deciding whether to write a policy on a house that was flagged elsewhere, evidence of the work gives them something concrete to weigh against the model's number.
Weather and development patterns outside your control also move the score. A new housing tract built with cleared buffers nearby can lower the modeled risk for the whole area, just as a drought year or a wildfire burning through a neighboring canyon can raise it. None of that reflects anything about your house specifically, but it shows up in the same address-level data insurers pull. This is part of why a score that got your policy canceled with one insurer doesn't necessarily mean every insurer will see your address the same way, this year or next.
Does a fire score mean the house can't be insured at all
A high fire score narrows which insurers will write the policy. It rarely means no insurer will. Standard insurers set their own cutoffs for how much wildfire risk they'll take on, and those cutoffs differ by company, so a score that one insurer treats as disqualifying might fall well within another's limits.
If standard insurers keep declining, most states with meaningful wildfire exposure run a FAIR Plan. This is coverage of last resort for property that private insurers won't take on the open market. A FAIR Plan policy usually costs more than a standard one and covers less. Many only cover the structure itself, not belongings or liability, so homeowners often pair it with a separate policy to fill those gaps. It keeps a lender's insurance requirement satisfied while you work on lowering the risk or finding a standard insurer later.
Surplus lines insurers are another option many homeowners haven't heard of. These companies aren't licensed the same way as standard insurers, which lets them take on risk standard companies won't, including high fire scores. They tend to cost more and offer fewer consumer protections than a standard policy, so they're usually a step taken when the FAIR Plan and standard market both fall short, not a first choice.
None of these paths are permanent placements. A homeowner on a FAIR Plan or with a surplus lines insurer can move back to the standard market once the score improves or once an insurer willing to write the address at its current score turns up. Checking again each renewal costs nothing, and the market for a given address can look different a year or two later even if nothing about the house has changed.
Before your coverage ends
Check your cancellation letter for the deadline. Then look up your address on your state's wildfire risk portal if one exists. Knowing your actual score shows what a new insurer would be weighing.
