California Wildfire Laws New in 2026: What Homeowners Must Know

AB 888 (Calderon), chaptered October 10, 2025, creates a grant program inside the Department of Insurance to help homeowners pay for fire-safe roof replacement and for hardening the first 5 feet around a structure (Zone 0-style mitigation). Funds sit in a new Sustainable Insurance Account and are available once the Legislature appropriates money for the program.

Who it affects: to qualify, a homeowner must be considered low-income for their county, live in a High or Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone, and be insured by an admitted carrier or the FAIR Plan. What to do: if you might qualify, watch the Department of Insurance's program page for when applications open — the law directs funding but doesn't guarantee it's flowing yet. Effective: the program itself was operative on signing (October 10, 2025); actual grants depend on appropriation.

SB 429 (Cortese), chaptered October 10, 2025, funds a university-based research center to build the nation's first publicly available wildfire catastrophe model — a tool for simulating wildfire property risk that insurers, planners, and local governments can use.

Who it affects: in practice, no one at the homeowner level yet — this is a research and data infrastructure bill, not a mitigation requirement or consumer benefit you can act on today. What to do: nothing right now; the model is a multi-year build and the Department of Insurance owes the Legislature a funding plan by September 1, 2026. It's worth knowing about because a public wildfire model could eventually inform how your area's risk (and insurance pricing) gets assessed.

AB 1 (Connolly), chaptered October 9, 2025, requires the Department of Insurance to periodically review and update its Safer from Wildfires regulation — the rule that requires insurers to factor mitigation work into pricing — to consider adding newer building-hardening measures, including materials on the State Fire Marshal's Building Materials Listing or meeting Chapter 7A of the California Building Standards Code.

Who it affects: every homeowner who wants mitigation work reflected in insurance pricing, eventually. What to do: don't wait on this — the first mandated review isn't due until January 1, 2030, then every five years after. Ask your insurer today whether work you've already done qualifies under the current Safer from Wildfires rules; AB 1 only affects future updates to that list. Effective: January 1, 2026, for the review mandate itself.

These additional laws affect insurance claims, the FAIR Plan, and wildfire-resilience financing:

• SB 495 ("Eliminate the List") — after a total loss in a declared disaster, insurers must pay 60% of your personal property coverage limit (capped at $350,000) without requiring a detailed item-by-item inventory, and the deadline to file proof of loss is extended to at least 100 days, with good-cause extensions. Applies to policies issued or renewed on or after July 1, 2026.
• AB 226 (FAIR Plan Stability Act) — lets the California FAIR Plan, the insurer of last resort in high-risk areas, access catastrophe bonds and credit arrangements so it can pay claims after a severe wildfire season without collapsing or triggering emergency assessments on all policyholders statewide.
• AB 1680 (Chapter 540) — signed September 27, 2026. It will authorize the Insurance Commissioner to require the FAIR Plan to adjust policy limits available through its programs and add fair-rental-value coverage to its renters’ insurance program. It does not itself set a new policy limit or change the published wildfire-hardening discount percentages.
• SB 894 (Chapter 770) — signed September 29, 2026. It establishes the California Wildfire Resilience Loan Program for wildfire-risk reduction, including home hardening and defensible-space improvements. The authority is to develop and administer the program upon legislative appropriation, so the law does not by itself mean loans are available now.

Governor Newsom signed a four-bill wildfire recovery package on September 15, 2026. Two of those bills — AB 1642 (Harabedian) and AB 1795 (Gipson, the Smoke Damage Recovery Act) — create what the Governor's office describes as the nation's first enforceable standards for testing, remediating and restoring homes damaged by wildfire smoke. The other two bills in the package, AB 1842 and AB 1847 (Harabedian), extend mortgage forbearance for disaster-affected homeowners rather than changing anything about the house itself.

Who it affects: homeowners filing a smoke-damage claim after a wildfire — not homeowners doing hardening work. The Department of Insurance estimates that more than 13,000 of the roughly 40,000 claims filed after the January 2025 fires involved smoke damage to homes that never burned. The legislation requires insurers to pay for lead and asbestos testing and remediation in smoke-damaged homes within a wildfire zone, to cover cleanup and restoration to pre-loss condition, and bars insurers from cutting off Additional Living Expense coverage until a home is actually remediated and safe to occupy. What to do: nothing on the mitigation side — none of these four bills changes defensible space, Zone 0 or the discounts you can earn for hardening work. Now on the books: the Secretary of State chaptered both bills on September 15, 2026 — AB 1642 as Chapter 239, Statutes of 2026 and AB 1795 as Chapter 240, Statutes of 2026 — and the Legislature's records list each as a "Non-Urgency" measure, so neither took effect on signing. What is still missing is the substance: the laws direct the Department of Toxic Substances Control and the Air Resources Board to develop the testing and remediation standards, and those standards do not exist yet.

SB 876 (Padilla), Chapter 656, was approved and filed with the Secretary of State on September 27, 2026. It updates residential property insurance rules, not defensible-space or home-hardening requirements.

Starting January 1, 2028: for properties eligible for replacement-cost coverage, insurers must offer extended replacement-cost coverage of at least 50% above the primary-dwelling policy limit. Covered open residential policies that provide replacement-cost coverage must also include building-code-upgrade coverage of at least 10% of the dwelling limit as additional coverage; using it cannot reduce or deplete the dwelling limit. The required disclosure describes this coverage as paying additional costs to comply with building codes and zoning laws in effect at the time of rebuilding and required for rebuilding.

Insurers providing replacement-cost coverage must give a rebuilding or replacement-cost estimate every other year when offering renewal. This estimate requirement also applies to California FAIR Plan policies when replacement-cost coverage is available and the offered or provided policy limit is below the program's maximum combined policy limit. These are insurance-offer and coverage rules, not a new mitigation task for homeowners. Ask your insurer or broker what coverage your policy offers.

None of the 2026 laws above change your existing compliance obligations:

• PRC 4291 defensible space — 100 feet of clearance around structures in State Responsibility Area / Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone land is still the baseline law, unchanged by AB 888, SB 429, or AB 1.
• AB-38 — sellers of homes in a High or Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone still must provide defensible space compliance documentation at sale. Not touched by the 2026 package.
• Zone 0 — the stricter 5-foot ember-resistant standard that AB 888 references was approved by the Board of Forestry on August 19, 2026, after the Board missed its December 31, 2025 deadline. It is not enforceable, and the rulemaking stalled: the package was submitted to the Office of Administrative Law as an emergency rulemaking (file 2026-0828-03E) and then withdrawn from that review on September 8, 2026. It has not been resubmitted, so there is no effective date.
• Insurance discounts — the Safer from Wildfires framework and the FAIR Plan's wildfire hardening discount program already exist. AB 1 only changes how often that framework gets reviewed going forward.