Willow and Hearth

Homeowners insurers in wildfire-prone states are increasingly tying coverage decisions to how much cleared space surrounds a house, and regulators are formalizing the link: California’s Safer from Wildfires regulation now requires insurers to factor defensible-space compliance and other mitigation steps into pricing, meaning a property that skips brush clearance can lose a discount other homeowners on the same street receive — or, increasingly, lose a renewal offer altogether.

Key Points

• More than 2 million California properties were rated at high to extreme wildfire risk as of 2021, according to the Insurance Information Institute.
• Insurers processed nearly 40,000 wildfire claims and paid out more than $20 billion in Southern California in the year following the 2025 fires, per National Mortgage Professional‘s review of the claims data.
• A one-year state moratorium barring insurers from dropping wildfire-zone policies for risk alone is winding down, and insurers are now folding defensible-space compliance and other mitigation steps back into underwriting.
• In Arizona, non-renewal rates in high-risk counties track burned acreage with roughly a one-to-two-year lag, per a University of Arizona Cooperative Extension analysis.

The mechanics vary by state, but the direction is the same. California’s regulation ties specific discounts to actions homeowners can document — trimming trees, clearing brush and debris, and meeting local defensible-space ordinances — with the state noting that “every action under Safer from Wildfires will qualify you for an insurance discount.” The Insurance Information Institute recommends keeping combustible structures at least 30 feet from a home and vegetation cleared out to roughly 100 feet in high-risk zones, standards increasingly referenced in underwriting questionnaires alongside a property’s distance from wildland, its prior evacuation history, and whether it has fire-resistant construction.

In Arizona, the pattern shows up in the claims data rather than a single statewide rule. Non-renewals in Gila County “closely mirror burned acreage, with a roughly two-year lag,” the Cooperative Extension analysis found, and Maricopa County alone accounted for 54.9% of all non-renewals statewide between 2018 and 2023, even though the highest per-policy non-renewal rates showed up in smaller, higher-risk northern and eastern counties — Navajo County peaked at 4.8% in a single year, more than five times Arizona’s 0.8% statewide average.

For homeowners, the practical takeaway is that defensible space has moved from a fire-safety suggestion to a documentation requirement insurers can ask for at renewal. California’s moratorium bought wildfire-zone homeowners a temporary reprieve from non-renewal after the 2025 fires — State Farm alone renewed roughly 1,100 policies in the hardest-hit areas in January 2025 — but as those protections expire, insurers are expected to lean more, not less, on whether a property meets mitigation standards before writing the next policy.