Every California jurisdiction we can prove has a Zone 0 rule in force

Name: California Zone 0 local ordinance register
Creator: The Zone Zero Report
License: https://zonezeroreport.com/about

Fact-checked August 23, 2026·Sources at the end of this article

Twelve San Diego fire districts are named in one county code, and we list three of them

Read October 4, 2026. The County of San Diego's 2026 Wildland-Urban Interface Code, adopted by an ordinance of the Board of Supervisors and effective April 2, 2026, is a single document that, in its own words, "contains the ordinances of each of the 12 fire protection districts shown in the box below". The box names them: Alpine, Bonita-Sunnyside, Deer Springs, Lakeside, North County, Rancho Santa Fe, Rincon Del Diablo, San Diego County Fire, San Marcos, San Miguel, Valley Center and Vista.

Its section 604.12.1 is operative code and not an appendix. It reads: "Zone 0 'Immediate Zone' 0-5' Meaning from exterior wall surface or patio, deck or attachment to building or structure extending 5 feet on a horizontal plane. This zone shall be constructed of continuous hardscape or non-combustible materials. Removal of combustible materials surrounding the exterior wall area and maintaining area free and clear of combustible materials. The use of mulch and other combustible materials shall be prohibited." Deer Springs, North County and San Diego County Fire carry a variant of that section with its own lettered list. Fences are not named in 604.12.1; the code's Annex D is where "fences attachments" appears, in the same wording Rancho Santa Fe and North County already carry on this register.

Three of those twelve are rows here and nine are not, and we would rather say so than quietly carry on. North County, Rancho Santa Fe and Valley Center are listed, each against its own district ordinance effective January 1, 2026. The other nine are not listed, and their absence is not a finding that they have no rule. It is that every row in this register names an adopting instrument and a date, we have those for three districts and not yet for the other nine, and the April 2 county code may also supersede the January 1 district ordinances we cite. We are working through that and will add rows as each is pinned down.

What a reader in one of those nine should do in the meantime is not wait for us. If your address is in the Alpine, Bonita-Sunnyside, Deer Springs, Lakeside, Rincon Del Diablo, San Diego County Fire, San Marcos, San Miguel or Vista district, the county's own code names your district and carries a Zone 0 section, so assume it applies to you today and ask your district to confirm. That is the opposite of the advice this site was giving three of those communities until tonight, which is covered in the correction on the county page.

The short version

The statewide Zone 0 regulation was adopted on August 19, 2026 and is not yet in effect. Thirty-five local jurisdictions are not waiting: they already require an ember-resistant zone in the first five feet, on their own timetables, with their own scopes. We verified each one from the jurisdiction's own adopted text. There is no official state list of these, which is why we keep one. It is almost certainly incomplete, and we say so below rather than pretending otherwise.

Why a register instead of a number

We started this site saying four jurisdictions had Zone 0 rules in force. County research took it to six, then seven, and a single day of proper survey work took it to twelve. Nothing changed in California during that day. What changed is how carefully we looked. Paradise, the thirteenth, came later still, and it had been in force the whole time.

That is worth being honest about, because it tells you something real: nobody maintains a list of these. Not the Board of Forestry, not the Office of the State Fire Marshal, not any county. Ember-resistant zone rules are being adopted one fire district and one city council at a time, and they are not being counted anywhere. So we are not going to give you a confident number. We are going to give you the ones we can prove, name what we checked, and add to it.

What we learned on August 24, 2026, when this table went from twenty to twenty-six in a day. None of those six adopted anything that day. What changed is that we stopped searching for city names and started searching for the operative sentence, and the moment we did, the rules arrived in families. Riverside County Fire's Section 604.11, the fence rule with the replacement trigger, turned out to sit word for word in the county code and in Indio, Indian Wells, Moreno Valley, Menifee and Norco, three of which adopted it on the same day. San Diego County's Zone 0 sentence, the one requiring "continuous hardscape or non-combustible materials," turned out to sit in the county's Consolidated Fire Code since April 2023 and in the separate ordinances of Rancho Santa Fe and Valley Center fire districts.

That changes the useful question. These are not thirty independent councils each inventing a fence rule; they are a much smaller number of county fire agencies writing model text that then moves through every district and city that adopts a code cycle. If you want to know whether a Zone 0 rule is coming to your address, the productive question is not "has my city council discussed this," which usually gets you a blank look, but "what does my county fire agency's model ordinance say, and has my jurisdiction adopted this code cycle yet." One of those has an answer a clerk can give you.

It also means this table is an undercount in a specific, predictable direction rather than a random one. Wherever we have found one member of a family we should expect the rest, and both times we have gone looking, we have found more. We name the ones we have not yet verified on the county pages instead of quietly leaving them out. We have written the whole pattern up separately, with both families, the ratification step and the statute that makes room for it, in how local Zone 0 rules actually spread.

If your jurisdiction is not here, that does not mean it has no rule. It means we have not verified one. We have surveyed all fifty-eight of California's counties. Most are published below or linked from this table; the ones where we found nothing are listed at the end, because “no rule” and “we did not look” are different answers and you deserve to know which one you are getting.

California froze local building codes until 2031, and wrote home hardening out of the freeze

There is a reason this table can keep growing while almost nothing else in local building law is allowed to move, and we found it on August 24, 2026 while checking something unrelated. It is worth a section of its own, because it is the clearest signal we have seen of what the state actually intends to let cities do about wildfire.

Assembly Bill 130 of 2025 amended Health and Safety Code section 17958, effective June 30, 2025. The amended subdivision (b) reads:

"Commencing October 1, 2025, to June 1, 2031, inclusive, a city or county shall not make changes that are applicable to residential units in the provisions adopted pursuant to Section 17922 and published in the California Building Standards Code… unless one of the following conditions is met…"

Health and Safety Code section 17958(b), as amended by Statutes 2025, Chapter 22, Section 29 (AB 130).

That is a freeze on local residential building-standard amendments lasting nearly six years, passed as housing-cost policy. Six conditions escape it. Two of them are these:

"(3) The changes or modifications relate to home hardening.
(4) The building standards relate to home hardening and are proposed for adoption by a fire protection district pursuant to Section 13869.7."

Read those two against the table below. Every local rule we added to this register in the second half of 2025 and the first half of 2026 was adopted after the freeze began on October 1, 2025: Riverside County's cities in November, Rancho Santa Fe and Valley Center's fire districts in October and January, Redlands with the 2026 code cycle, Santee in January, Indian Wells in February. We are not going to tell you which exception each council relied on, because the ordinances do not say and we have not asked. What we can say is that the subject they legislated on is the subject the Legislature left open while closing most of the others. And condition (4) names section 13869.7, the same statute that requires a city council to ratify a fire district's building standards, which means the Legislature was thinking specifically about the fire district route these rules keep travelling.

The practical version, if you are a homeowner wondering whether your city might add a Zone 0 rule: between now and June 2031 your city is barred from changing most of its residential building standards at all, and home hardening is one of the narrow lanes still open. That does not mean your city will act. It means that if it acts on anything in this area, this is the kind of thing it is permitted to act on, and a fence rule in the first five feet sits squarely in that lane.

One limit we will not paper over. Section 17958 does not define "home hardening," so exactly which local Zone 0 provisions qualify is a question the statute leaves open, and we know of no case testing it. We note that at least one ordinance on our effective-date watch list, Kensington Fire Protection District's, uses the phrase in its own text, describing "defensible space and home hardening measures that include Zone Zero standards." That is a drafter reading the exception the same way we are, which is evidence but not authority.

Every county has now been read, so an empty square means checked and clean rather than unexamined. All 35 are almost certainly still an undercount.

The thirty-five we can prove

Each row was read from the jurisdiction's own ordinance, code section or adopted standard, not from a summary. Scope matters more than the entry itself: several of these bind only new construction, and one of the best known imposes no fence requirement at all.

The table is grouped by county, then by jurisdiction name, so you can find your own area in one pass. It used to be in the order we found things, which told you about us rather than about California. Grouping also puts the families side by side: all nine Riverside County entries carry one fence rule between them, and four of the five San Diego County entries share a Zone 0 sentence that goes back to 2023. The City of San Diego is the exception in its county, running its own separately drafted rule.

One caution about the five fire district rows, added August 24, 2026. Health and Safety Code section 13869.7(c) provides that "No ordinance adopted by the district shall be effective until ratification by the city, county, or city and county where the ordinance will apply." A fire district's Zone 0 fence rule is a building standard, and on incorporated land inside the district it therefore waits on that city council's own vote, which the statute also lets the council modify or deny. So a district row here means the district adopted the rule, not that it is in force on every parcel inside the district's boundary. We have now read four of them for the Ventura district: Ojai's Resolution 25-37 of October 28, 2025, adopted and complete, plus the council packets for Port Hueneme (November 17, 2025), Simi Valley (Resolution 2025-35, November 17, 2025) and Moorpark (December 3, 2025). Only Ojai's is the adopted record; the other three are packets, two of them with the resolution number still blank, so we describe them as packets. We track it as an open question rather than leaving it implied.

Jurisdiction	County	In force	What it reaches	Fence rule?
City of Berkeley	Alameda	January 1, 2026, two instruments: the EMBER inspection program and BMC Chapter 19.49, the consolidated WUI code	Continuous Zone 0 duties across the locally designated Very High zone under §604.3.1; the inspection program's roughly 1,400 properties sit in two named mitigation areas inside it. Not citywide	Yes, and stricter on repairs than the state. Attached fences need a five-foot noncombustible span; an unattached non-parallel fence within five feet needs one too; and no new or replacement sections of combustible fence within five feet, where the state text permits combustible repairs
City of Fremont	Alameda	Fire Department Defensible Space Inspection Guide, adopted with the city's WUI code by Ordinance 12-2025, September 16, 2025	Very High zones: new combustible fences and bark-mulch fencing; existing wood fences untouched	Yes
Unincorporated Butte County	Butte	Ordinance 4199, adopted February 9, 2021, in force thirty-five days later	Every parcel in the unincorporated county, existing structures included. Non-compliance is declared a public nuisance	No express fence rule. The word “fence” does not appear anywhere in the chapter, though “combustible material” is defined to include wood
Town of Paradise	Butte	Chapter adopted November 12, 2019 after the Camp Fire; current text Ordinance 642, effective March 13, 2025	Every improved and unimproved parcel in town, existing structures included. No grandfather clause, and the seller must obtain a certificate of compliance before ownership transfers	Yes, and stricter than the state rule. All fencing within five feet must be noncombustible, attached or not, new or existing
Moraga-Orinda Fire District	Contra Costa	March 17, 2023. The district has since adopted Ordinance 26-02, the 2025 state WUI code with local amendments, on January 21, 2026, effective thirty-five days later; we have not yet read its text and do not know what it changes here	All structures, new and existing	No. Ground cover reaches two feet, not five
Unincorporated Napa County	Napa	May 2021	New construction only	No
City of Grass Valley	Nevada	Ordinance 832, adopted December 10, 2024	Citywide	No
City of Nevada City	Nevada	2023, Ordinance 2023-03	Citywide	No
Unincorporated Nevada County	Nevada	Nevada County Code §4.01.040(C)(10)	All unincorporated territory	No
City of Laguna Beach	Orange	November 5, 2021	Existing structures in the Very High zone	Yes
City of Auburn	Placer	July 10, 2024	New construction only; expressly voluntary for existing buildings	Yes
City of Banning	Riverside	Ordinance 1613, section 5, adopted November 12, 2025, as Municipal Code Chapter 15.11	The county scheme again. Banning is the first entry on this register we found by sweeping a county’s cities rather than by following a lead to a particular document	Yes, the county’s Section 604.11 verbatim, including the replacement trigger
City of Beaumont	Riverside	Ordinance 1190, section 13, adopted November 4, 2025, amending Municipal Code Chapter 15.20 in its entirety	The county scheme again. Beaumont ties Moreno Valley as the earliest adopter in the county. The chapter it replaced was the old fire code chapter, which dated from 2019	Yes, the county’s Section 604.11 verbatim, including the replacement trigger
City of Indian Wells	Riverside	Chapter 16.34, Ordinance 769, adopted February 5, 2026	Identical text to Indio, adopted separately, full Zone 0/1/2 scheme included	Yes, same two-part rule, including the replacement trigger
City of Indio	Riverside	Article 93A, Ordinance 1824, adopted November 19, 2025	A full Zone 0/1/2 defensible-space scheme across the required 100-foot clearance, in applicable Fire Hazard Severity Zones: Zone 0 bars artificial grass, mulch, firewood and vines on near-structure fences, and existing fuel-modification zones can be ordered retrofitted when the fire code official requires it	Yes, and it reverses the state repair rule. All new fencing and gates noncombustible, no attachment trigger. Fencing installed before January 1, 2026 may remain, but replacing any part of a non-parallel run within five feet means the whole run must come back noncombustible
City of Jurupa Valley	Riverside	Ordinance 2025-24, section 6, adopted November 6, 2025, in Municipal Code Chapter 8.05	The county scheme again, adopted inside the city’s construction-code chapter rather than a fire chapter. Its copy is the most edited in the family, though none of the edits changes meaning	Yes, the county’s Section 604.11, including the replacement trigger
City of La Quinta	Riverside	Ordinance 627, introduced December 2 and adopted December 16, 2025, amending Municipal Code Title 8	The county scheme again, adopted as part of a whole-code cycle rather than a standalone fire ordinance. Its findings of local conditions are unusually detailed, running from annual rainfall of just over three inches to why aluminum wiring fails in desert heat	Yes, the county’s Section 604.11 verbatim, including the replacement trigger
City of Lake Elsinore	Riverside	Ordinance 1521, adopted November 18, 2025, as Municipal Code Chapter 15.58	The county scheme again, reaching the hazard zones Chapter 6 covers. The city drew its own map first: Ordinance 2025-1519 designates the Fire Hazard Severity Zones inside the city as CAL FIRE recommended them, and the fence rule is scoped to those zones	Yes, the county’s Section 604.11 verbatim, including the replacement trigger that brings a whole run within five feet back noncombustible
City of Menifee	Riverside	Ordinance 2025-425, passed November 19, 2025, as Municipal Code Chapter 8.21	The same Zone 0 scheme the county wrote: fuels prohibited in the first five feet for new buildings, additions and new or replacement landscape, with a narrower mulch, firewood and under-deck list for buildings whose landscape predates January 1, 2026	Yes, the county's Section 604.11 verbatim, including the replacement trigger that brings a whole run within five feet back noncombustible
City of Moreno Valley	Riverside	Ordinance 1033, adopted November 4, 2025, as Municipal Code Chapter 8.84 amending the 2025 state WUI code	Zone 0, the first five feet, in the hazard zones Chapter 6 reaches; new buildings, additions and new or replacement landscape get a fully noncombustible Zone 0, and buildings whose landscape predates January 1, 2026 get the mulch, firewood and under-deck rules	Yes, and it is the third city to reverse the state repair rule. New fencing and gates noncombustible; fencing installed before January 1, 2026 may remain, but replacing any portion within five feet requires the whole run within five feet, gates included, to come back noncombustible
City of Norco	Riverside	Ordinance 1135, adopted November 19, 2025, as Municipal Code Chapter 15.130	Same scheme again, and its Section 604.3 adds the Riverside County Fire Department Guidelines to the four state laws the model code already points at	Yes, the county's Section 604.11 verbatim, including the replacement trigger
City of Palm Desert	Riverside	Ordinance 1439, adopted January 8, 2026, as Municipal Code Chapter 15.16	The same scheme, and its Section 302.1.1 designates moderate, high and very high zones on the State Fire Marshal’s recommendation. The statewide rule reaches only the Very High zone inside a Local Responsibility Area, so the map this rule is scoped to is the wider one	Yes, the county’s Section 604.11 verbatim, including the replacement trigger
City of Temecula	Riverside	Ordinance 2025-14, adopted November 18, 2025, as Municipal Code Chapter 15.17	The same scheme, lightly re-edited rather than copied character for character: Temecula spells out “five feet” where the county wrote the numeral, and drops the county’s “req by” typo in the scope sentence. The substance is unchanged	Yes, the county’s Section 604.11, including the replacement trigger
City of Wildomar	Riverside	Ordinance 258, introduced October 13 and adopted November 12, 2025, amending Municipal Code Chapter 8.28 and creating Chapter 8.30	The county scheme again. Wildomar is the second-earliest adopter in the county after Moreno Valley, and it was on our named-leads list for five days before we could read the adopted text	Yes, the county’s Section 604.11 verbatim, including the replacement trigger
Unincorporated Riverside County	Riverside	Ordinance 787.11, adopted December 9, 2025, effective January 7, 2026	Unincorporated areas, fences within five feet of buildings in an applicable Fire Hazard Severity Zone. The source of the Indio and Indian Wells text, all three carrying the same Zone 0 maintenance list: artificial grass, vines on near-structure fences, mulch and firewood all barred	Yes, the same two-part rule as its cities: new fencing noncombustible, and replacing any part of a non-parallel run within five feet brings the whole run back noncombustible
City of Redlands	San Bernardino	Ordinance 2998, adopted December 2025 with the 2026 code cycle	All existing habitable buildings in High and Very High zones, the widest hazard trigger on this table	No, but organic mulch is banned and noncombustible ground cover required in the first five feet
North County Fire Protection District	San Diego	Ordinance 2025-03, its 2025 California WUI Code ordinance, effective January 1, 2026. The document does not print a board adoption date, only that effective date	The district’s boundaries in unincorporated San Diego County, around Fallbrook, Bonsall and Rainbow. Its Section 604.12.1 is the San Diego family text word for word: Zone 0 is the first five feet from the exterior wall, patio, deck or attachment, and that zone "shall be constructed of continuous hardscape or non-combustible materials", with combustible materials, firewood and lumber removed	No fence-specific section, the eleventh row with a Zone 0 rule and no fence provision. Its Annex D lists "fences attachments" among the combustible materials to remove from Zone 0, and its fuel-modification definition treats fences within five feet of a dwelling as structures, both identical to Rancho Santa Fe’s
Rancho Santa Fe Fire Protection District	San Diego	Its 2025 California WUI Code ordinance, effective January 1, 2026	The district's boundaries within unincorporated San Diego County. Its Section 604.12.1 defines Zone 0 as the first five feet from the exterior wall, patio, deck or attachment, and requires that zone to be "constructed of continuous hardscape or non-combustible materials," with mulch and other combustible materials prohibited. Whether that duty reaches existing untouched buildings is not answered cleanly by the text	No fence-specific section, which makes it the eighth row with a Zone 0 rule and no fence provision. Its own Annex D figure does list "fences attachments" among the combustible materials to remove from Zone 0, and its fuel-modification definition treats fences within five feet of a dwelling as structures
City of San Diego	San Diego	Ordinance O-22042, the city's local amendments to the 2025 Wildland-Urban Interface Code, codified at Municipal Code §512.0604. In force for new structures from February 28, 2026; existing-home deadlines from February 2027	The Very High zone inside city limits, which is wider than the state's map: the city re-designated its High and Moderate areas as Very High and added canyons and brush management areas when it adopted its own map by Ordinance O-21992	Yes
Unincorporated San Diego County	San Diego	County of San Diego Consolidated Fire Code §4907.9.1, effective April 13, 2023, renumbered §604.12.1 in the 2026 edition. In force more than three years before the state adopted its own version	The unincorporated county's fire protection districts, which the Consolidated Fire Code compiles. Zone 0 is the first five feet and "shall be constructed of continuous hardscape or non-combustible materials," mulch prohibited. The San Diego County Fire Protection District adds its own subsections requiring combustible materials removed from roofs, gutters, decks, porches and stairways, and prohibiting firewood and lumber. Whether the duty reaches existing untouched buildings is still not answered by the text. Rancho Santa Fe and Valley Center appear separately above because they adopted their own 2025-cycle ordinances	No fence-specific section, the tenth such row
City of Santee	San Diego	Ordinance 631, adopted January 14, 2026, adopting the 2025 Wildland-Urban Interface Code with local amendments	Very High zones inside the city, for work subject to the code. A separately added §603.5 also gives new developments a full Zone 0/1/2 fuel-modification scheme whose Zone 0 "shall be constructed of continuous hardscape or non-combustible materials," with mulch prohibited; whether it reaches existing untouched buildings is not answered by the text	Yes, in two tiers. All fencing in a Very High zone must be ignition resistant; the closest five feet to any structure must be noncombustible. No attachment trigger
Valley Center Fire Protection District	San Diego	Ordinance 2025-68, finally adopted October 16, 2025 on a 5 to 0 roll call vote, published by the district as effective January 1, 2026	The district's boundaries within unincorporated San Diego County. Its Section 604.12.1 is word for word the same as Rancho Santa Fe's: Zone 0 is the first five feet and "shall be constructed of continuous hardscape or non-combustible materials," with mulch prohibited	No fence-specific section, the ninth such row, and the same two indirect pointers as Rancho Santa Fe: the Annex D figure and the fuel-modification definition
Woodside Fire Protection District	San Mateo	Adopted April 30, 2024, effective 30 days later	District-wide	Yes, at six feet, and only for new fences
Montecito Fire Protection District	Santa Barbara	Development Standard #2, November 2025	New buildings and additions, not untouched existing homes	Yes
Ventura County Fire Protection District	Ventura	New buildings from April 2019; full noncombustible Zone 0 for new work from March 1, 2025	New buildings, additions, and new or refurbished landscaping, in most of the county outside three cities. An untouched existing building with pre-2025 landscaping falls under a shorter list	Yes, and its wording is the one Riverside County uses. Ordinance 34 Section 604.11 requires noncombustible fencing and gates installed on or after January 1, 2023, and has been in force in the district since that date. Fencing installed before it may remain, subject to a replacement trigger whose sentence is identical, character for character, to the one in the Riverside County code adopted three years later

Take the data

No state agency keeps this list, so if you need it for a report, a council packet, a grant application or a story, take it rather than retyping it. Both files are generated from the table above on every build, so they cannot fall out of step with what is published here.

california-zone-0-register.csv one row per jurisdiction, plain text.
california-zone-0-register.json the same rows plus provenance: the retrieval date, the method, the field definitions and the caveat below.

How to cite it: The Zone Zero Report, California Zone 0 local ordinance register, https://zonezeroreport.com/california-zone-0-register, retrieved [date]. Use is free and we ask only for a link back, so a reader can check the row against the adopting document. Reporters: the page for journalists carries the headline figures from this table with attribution lines, counted on every build.

One caveat that has to travel with the file. Each row summarises an instrument. It is not the instrument. Ordinances are amended, and a downloaded extract has no way of knowing that, which is why every row names its adopting document and why the JSON carries the date it was taken. Read the source before relying on a row.

The three things this table is for

Check the scope column before you spend anything. Several of these reach only new construction or additions. If you own an existing house in Auburn, Napa or Montecito, the local rule very likely does not require you to change your fence today.
Do not assume a Zone 0 rule is a fence rule. Eleven of the thirty-five impose no fence requirement at all. Moraga-Orinda has one of the earliest ember-resistant zones in California and its only fence provision bans bark and wood-chip fencing within 100 feet, which is a different thing entirely, and Redlands regulates what lies on the ground in the first five feet while saying nothing about what a fence is made of.
One county answers it both ways. Butte County contains the clearest example on this table. The Town of Paradise, rebuilt after the Camp Fire, requires all fencing within five feet of any structure to be noncombustible, with no exemption for existing fences and a certificate of compliance required before a sale closes. Drive out of the town limits into the unincorporated county and the ordinance covering the same five feet never mentions fences at all. Same county, same fire history, opposite answers. This is why we do not publish a number and tell you to look yourself.
Check the distance. Every rule here is five feet except Woodside's, which is written at six. A reader who "knows the five-foot rule" gets Woodside wrong.

One email when something actually changes

The Zone Zero Brief: Board actions, local deadlines, insurance filings: dated, sourced, no filler. One email when something changes, not on a schedule.

What we have not checked

The pattern across everything we did check is written up in one place: what all fifty-eight county codes actually say about wildfire, which carries a county-by-county table of all fifty-eight and the eight codes that may change meaning the day the state rule takes effect.

We have surveyed all fifty-eight counties: Alameda, Alpine, Amador, Butte, Calaveras, Colusa, Contra Costa, Del Norte, El Dorado, Fresno, Glenn, Humboldt, Imperial, Inyo, Kern, Kings, Lake, Lassen, Los Angeles, Madera, Marin, Mariposa, Mendocino, Merced, Modoc, Mono, Monterey, Napa, Nevada, Orange, Placer, Plumas, Riverside, Sacramento, San Benito, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Francisco, San Joaquin, San Luis Obispo, San Mateo, Santa Barbara, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Shasta, Sierra, Siskiyou, Solano, Sonoma, Stanislaus, Sutter, Tehama, Trinity, Tulare, Tuolumne, Ventura, Yolo and Yuba. What remains is the layer below the counties: California has hundreds of fire protection districts with independent ordinance authority, and most city codes are unread.

Checked, and there is nothing to report

A survey that finds nothing is still a result, and it is the one most likely to save you money. If we looked at your county and found no ember-resistant zone rule, you should hear that from us plainly rather than be left to wonder whether we simply skipped you.

Unincorporated Lake County: no Zone 0. The county has a Hazardous Vegetation Abatement Ordinance, Ordinance No. 3082, adopted March 26, 2019, and it is a genuine defensible space rule. It is also a thirty-foot one, extendable to a hundred feet at the fire official's direction, with ten-foot clearances at frontage roads and chimneys. It sets no requirement inside the first five feet and never mentions fences or gates. If somebody quotes you for a Zone 0 fence in Lakeport or Clearlake on the strength of a county ordinance, ask them which section they mean.
Novato Fire Protection District, Marin County: no Zone 0, read the hard way. The district's Ordinance 2025-4 adopts the 2025 California Wildland Urban Interface Code with local amendments, and it was posted as an image-only scan we long listed as unreadable. On August 23, 2026 we read all 33 pages from images of the signed scan. The ordinance's own amendment index lists every changed section, and no ember-resistant-zone rule and no fence provision is among them. It does use the words "Zone 0", twice, without attaching a requirement to them: once as a fuel-zone boundary inside vegetation management plans for new construction, once defining an exterior sprinkler system that "hydrates" the first five feet. One trap worth carrying away: Novato's amended section 508 is about exterior wall coverings, while Contra Costa County Fire's section 508, in the same model code, is a fence rule for subdivisions. A bare citation to "WUI code section 508" means nothing until you know which district is talking.
Truckee Fire Protection District, Nevada and Placer Counties: no Zone 0. The district's two ordinances were the last unread instruments in Nevada County, both image-only scans, and on August 23, 2026 we read them from page images of the signed scans. Ordinance 02-2012 is a hundred-foot defensible space rule, most intense in the first thirty feet, with no five-foot band, no fence provision and no materials standard. Ordinance 01-2019 adds a buyer disclosure and a point-of-sale defensible space inspection against that 2012 standard. The district's own rebate program requires a clear "Zone Zero" before applying and pays toward replacing the five feet of fence closest to the house, which is exactly why people assume a rule exists: the program names a zone the district's ordinances never created. An incentive is not a mandate.
San Bernardino County Fire Protection District: no Zone 0, across ninety pages. The district's fire code, Ordinance FPD 23-01, adopted February 28, 2023, was the largest unread document on this site: a 90-page image-only scan. On August 23, 2026 we read it from page images of the signed scan, mapping every amendment it makes to the 2022 California Fire Code. It amends eight chapters and two appendices, covering permits, open flames, access roads, water supply, sprinklers and pallet yards, and none of it touches the first five feet, defensible space, or fence materials. The only fence provision in the ordinance is about electrified security fencing, and its "Wildfire Risk Area" definition exists to require permits for torches and open flames, not to regulate landscaping. The county's own binding five-foot fence rule, in the Fire Safety Overlay for new development, remains the only one in the county, and it does not reach existing homes.
Chico, Butte County: no Zone 0, in the county with the register's strictest rule. Chico sits forty minutes from Paradise, whose fence rule is the toughest we have verified anywhere, so the question of what the county's largest city requires is worth answering precisely. On August 23, 2026 we read every section of Chico's fire regulation chapters and the standards chapter they point to, which adopts the 2025 California Fire Code as amended through the city's January 2026 ordinance. The complete amendment list runs to permits, explosives, tanks, open fires, fireworks, hydrant spacing and a prohibition on combustible couches visible from the street, and none of it touches the first five feet, defensible space, or fences. Neighboring Oroville we cannot check: its code publisher blocks every tool we have and no archive of it exists, so Oroville stays unverified rather than negative.
Unincorporated Shasta County: no Zone 0, verified from the in-force text. The post-Carr-Fire county runs a genuine defensible space ordinance, Code Chapter 8.10, and for months we could read only its 2019 enacting version, because every route to the current text as amended by Ordinance SCC 2025-03 failed. The county's code publisher turned out to expose the codified text through its data service, current through February 2026, and the full chapter has now been read. It is a thirty-foot and one-hundred-foot clearance regime with vegetation-management duties and misdemeanor-grade enforcement, and it contains no ember-resistant zone, no five-foot band, and no materials rule. Its only five-foot reference is definitional: a fence within five feet of a dwelling counts as an "improvement," which puts vegetation-clearance duties around the fence without ever regulating the fence itself. The county's three cities were checked the same day, from the same codified source: Anderson adopted the 2025 Fire Code plainly in February 2026 with no local wildfire amendments; Redding's fire code amendments cover access roads, open burning and storage, plus a construction-standards pointer for its WUI areas; Shasta Lake's adoptions and nuisance chapters carry nothing at all. No Zone 0, no fence rule, no five-foot band anywhere in the county. If someone in Redding country quotes you for a noncombustible fence "to comply with county code," ask for the section number, because there is not one.
Santa Cruz County, county and cities: no Zone 0 anywhere we could read. The county moved its code to a reachable publisher, and the fire code chapter, current through a December 9, 2025 ordinance, is now read in full: local amendments cover access roads, water supply and sprinklers, with no ember-resistant zone and no fence rule, and the county's separate urban-wildland intermix chapter turns out to have been repealed outright. Scotts Valley adopts the 2025 state code suite, including the Wildland-Urban Interface Code, with no local wildfire amendments. Watsonville's fire code, read from a July 2024 archived codification, carries a thirty-foot firebreak duty and defers WUI vegetation clearance to the model code, with no five-foot rule. Capitola's building and fire chapters are short and carry nothing. The city of Santa Cruz is the honest gap: its publisher blocks every tool, and the newest readable text is a 2016 codification, negative then, unknowable since. The county's independent fire districts, including Central Fire and Scotts Valley Fire Protection District, publish rules we have not read.
San Luis Obispo County: no Zone 0 in force, and one city has quietly wired itself to the state standard. The county's fire prevention title, current through late 2025, adopts the 2025 Fire Code and the 2025 Wildland-Urban Interface Code plainly, and its only defensible-space regime is a hundred-foot nuisance ordinance for Cayucos. Atascadero, Paso Robles and Arroyo Grande are read and negative; Arroyo Grande adopted the 2025 WUI Code with Appendix G in November 2025 with no local amendments. The find is Morro Bay: by an ordinance adopted September 23, 2025, the city retitled its weed-abatement chapter "Weeds, Rubbish and Defensible Space" and made Public Resources Code 4291, Title 14 Section 1299.03 and the Board of Forestry's guidelines "the controlling standards" citywide, across every hazard designation. Today that chapter contains no Zone 0, because today's Section 1299.03 contains none. But the incorporation reads as dynamic, which means the day the state's ember-resistant-zone text takes effect, Morro Bay's own municipal code may carry it to parcels the state rule's Local Responsibility Area trigger would never reach. We track that alongside Contra Costa's identical question. The honest gaps: the city of San Luis Obispo's publisher blocks every tool and its fire code amendments are unread beyond an October 2024 table of contents with no wildfire chapter in it, and Pismo Beach and Grover Beach are unreachable with no archive coverage at all.
Monterey County: no Zone 0, from the county's own hundred-foot standard down. The county code, current through an April 2026 ordinance, was read through its publisher's data service: its wildfire chapters are subdivision-era development standards for State Responsibility Areas, thirty-foot structure setbacks and road and water rules, and a fire code whose defensible space section defers to Public Resources Code 4291 "or the Monterey County Code, whichever is more restrictive," at one hundred feet. Nothing regulates the first five feet and nothing touches fence materials. Salinas, Soledad and Del Rey Oaks read negative from current codified text; Soledad does have a fence-materials chapter, and it is an aesthetics rule from 2001 that expressly permits wood. Pacific Grove's fire prevention chapter, from a 2019 archived codification, adds the county's hundred-foot standard and nothing else. The gaps we cannot close: the city of Monterey and Carmel-by-the-Sea sit behind a publisher that blocks every tool, with no archive coverage at all, and the county's remaining cities and fire districts are unchecked.
Santa Clara County: no Zone 0 anywhere, and a pattern worth naming. The county's fire division, repealed and reenacted in December 2025, is sprinkler thresholds and access roads. San Jose, Saratoga, Los Gatos and Monte Sereno all adopted the 2025 Wildland-Urban Interface Code in a six-week window from November to December 2025, and all read negative: no ember-resistant zone, no fence rule. What two of those adoptions do share, with Santa Monica four hundred miles away, is an amendment to the model code's Section 604.2 that widens where hazardous vegetation and fuel management applies: San Jose and Monte Sereno extend it to Moderate hazard zones and city-designated WUI areas, well past the state rule's own triggers. Cities are quietly broadening where fuel rules reach while adding nothing about what the first five feet must be made of, which means the statewide Zone 0 text, when it takes effect, will land on more parcels in these cities than their residents may expect. Los Altos Hills runs 1960s-era hazardous-fire-area rules, spark arresters and firewood distances, with no five-foot band. Morgan Hill's fence provisions govern junkyards. Unchecked: Gilroy, Cupertino, Palo Alto, Campbell, Los Altos, Milpitas, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, the city of Santa Clara, and the county's fire districts.
Tuolumne County: no Zone 0, county or city. The county's Hazardous Vegetation Management Ordinance, Chapter 8.14, now read from the codified text the county itself posts, is a one-hundred-foot defensible space regime built on Public Resources Code 4291, with no five-foot band, no ember language and no fence provision. Sonora, the county's only city, rewrote its own defensible space chapter in June 2019 as the familiar thirty-foot zone plus reduced-fuel zone to one hundred feet, citing CAL FIRE's standards, and it too says nothing about the first five feet or what a fence may be made of. In the county that hosts three of the state's named wildfire-mitigation pilot communities, the local law never mentions the zone the pilots are hardening.
Kern County: no Zone 0, and the county's mountain communities answer to the county code. Kern readopted its fire code and its Wildland-Urban Interface Code in November 2025, and both are read from the current codified text. The WUI chapter adopts the 2025 state code with administrative amendments only: who enforces, which permits, how inspections run. The fire code's amendments are sprinklers, fireworks stands and oil wells, and its weeds chapter is a roadside regime. Nothing in either touches the first five feet or fence materials. That negative matters more here than in most counties, because Kern's fire-exposed mountain communities, Frazier Park, Kernville, Wofford Heights and the Kern River valley, are unincorporated and answer to exactly the code we read. Tehachapi, the one incorporated city in the interface, sits behind a blocked publisher with no archive coverage, and Bakersfield's code host we could not even locate; both are recorded as unchecked rather than clean.
Plumas, Siskiyou, Madera, Mendocino: four fire counties, no Zone 0 in any of them. All four were read through their publishers' data services from current codifications. Plumas, the county the Dixie Fire burned through, regulates fuel storage, driveways and post-fire debris; its "fire safe" chapter dates to 1992. Siskiyou's fire hazard regulations date to 1968. Madera's fire prevention chapters govern code adoption and livestock grazing, which matters because Oakhurst and Bass Lake are unincorporated and answer to them. Mendocino adopted a hazardous-vegetation nuisance ordinance in 2021, a general fire-hazard standard with no five-foot band. In each county the fire-exposed communities are largely unincorporated, so these county codes are their law, and none mentions the first five feet or fence materials.
Calaveras County: no Zone 0 today, and the third member of the incorporation club. By an ordinance adopted in February 2017, Calaveras wrote into its own code the state's defensible space regulations by reference: Public Resources Code sections 4291 through 4299, "commencing with Sections 1299.01 through 1299.05" of Title 14. That is the same dynamic incorporation we track for Contra Costa Fire and Morro Bay, and Calaveras adopted it earliest and most completely. Today those state sections contain no ember-resistant zone, so Calaveras carries none. The day the state's Zone 0 text lands in those sections, the county's own municipal code carries it too. Six jurisdictions now sit on that watch list, three pointed at the regulation and three, Mono, Inyo and Tehama, at the statutes it implements, and none of their residents has any reason to know it yet.
Trinity, Tehama, Yuba, Fresno, Mono and Modoc: six more counties, six negatives, one era. Every one of these counties regulates wildfire the way California did before Zone 0 was an idea. Trinity and Tehama run fire safe regulations adopted in 1991: road widths, hydrant markers, water supplies, thirty-foot setbacks. Tehama's separate fire hazard abatement chapter, we later noticed, directs that rural and agricultural firebreaks "shall be created and maintained in accordance [with] the Public Resources Code 4291 and Government Code 51182," which puts Tehama on the effective-day watch list described above alongside Mono and Inyo. Yuba requires firebreaks per Public Resources Code 4291 and makes a building official certify them at site-plan stage. Fresno County's defensible space chapter turns out to be a 2010 rule for eighteen named parcels along the San Joaquin River bluffs, thirty feet of clearance, with a fuel definition that expressly excludes fences. Mono and Modoc both adopted their rules in 2008, mirroring the state's thirty-foot and hundred-foot framework. Nothing in any of them regulates the first five feet or fence materials. Del Norte and Mariposa sit behind a publisher whose search works but whose text needs a login: Mariposa's search returns zero results for "defensible" and shows an unread 2025 interface code adoption, Del Norte's shows the 1991 fire-safe model. Both are recorded as partial, not surveyed. A later systematic sweep of both publishers' search indexes hardened these partials considerably. Mariposa's fire architecture is now fully enumerated by title: a fire hazard severity zone chapter, controlled burns, fireworks, a mandatory brush-clearing chapter with a fire-warden exemption, and the 2025 wildland-urban interface code adoption, with "defensible" returning zero results anywhere and the code's only "noncombustible" sitting inside the adopted state code's own definitions. Del Norte's Title 19 turns out to carry the 1991 fire-safe model with section names identical to neighboring Humboldt's, including a "Maintenance of Defensible Space Measures" section and a "Setback for Structure Defensible Space" section, and "noncombustible" returns zero results in the entire code. The texts stay unread behind the publisher's login, so both counties stay partial, but by their own publisher's index neither contains a five-foot materials rule. Hours later, both came off the partial list entirely: the publisher's print endpoint turns out to serve full section text, so we read the operative chapters from its own live pages. Del Norte runs the 1991 fire-safe model, re-enacted as Ordinance 2016-003, its scope confined to new development approved in the State Responsibility Area with existing structures exempt, and its maintenance section a condition-of-approval mechanism rather than an ongoing duty; "4291" and "noncombustible" return zero results in its entire code. Mariposa's Ordinance 550 of 1980 imposes a genuine ongoing countywide duty, a thirty-foot firebreak around every structure with the fire warden able to require clearance to one hundred feet, and its September 2025 ordinance adopts the state's 2025 Wildland-Urban Interface Code unamended, with "604" returning no fire-code hits. Its fire warden may exempt structures built entirely of nonflammable materials from clearing, the survey's neatest inversion: noncombustible construction as a way out of vegetation work. Nothing in either county touches the first five feet or fence materials. Both are surveyed from current text. Fifty-three counties are now read; five remain: Alpine, Amador, Glenn, Sacramento and Solano.
San Joaquin, Sutter, Kings, Imperial: the valley and desert tier, all negative. San Joaquin adopted the 2025 Wildland-Urban Interface Code in January 2026 with only administrative amendments, alongside a fire prevention division about burn permits and access. Sutter's fire chapter regulates open-burning distances and spark arresters. Kings regulates weeds and fireworks. Imperial's fire chapter is a Uniform Fire Code adoption from another era. No first-five-feet rule, no fence provision anywhere. Forty counties are now read, and the pattern has not changed once: the only California jurisdictions with a Zone 0 rule in force remain the thirty-five on this register.
Lassen, Stanislaus, Merced: three more negatives, and one sentence worth quoting. Stanislaus adopted the 2025 Wildland-Urban Interface Code by reference this February, unamended. Merced's code barely regulates fire at all: its vegetation provisions define garbage and wetlands. Lassen, the other county the Dixie Fire crossed, runs the modern fire-safe model, and its code contains the closest thing to Zone 0 language we have found in any county without a Zone 0 rule: where a new structure cannot meet the thirty-foot setback, the county may accept alternatives including "noncombustible block walls or fences" and "five feet of noncombustible material horizontally around the structure." That is the ember-resistant zone concept, appearing as an optional trade for a setback nobody could meet, years before the state made any of it mandatory. The five-foot idea reached Lassen's code as a bargaining chip, not a rule.
Tulare, Inyo, San Francisco: three negatives from three different Californias. Tulare, home of the SQF Complex burn scar, keeps a fire prevention article about burning and a disaster recovery chapter about debris, with no defensible-space ordinance of its own. Inyo, by a 2020 ordinance, designated every unincorporated acre of the county a Wildland-Urban Interface Fire Area, requiring construction to the state's WUI building standards as they update and property maintenance "in accordance with" Government Code 51182 and Public Resources Code 4291, the two statutes the ember-resistant zone was later written into, which makes Inyo a member of the incorporation club we track for effective day, with county enforcement behind it. Even there, the first five feet appears nowhere as a materials rule today, because the statutes' Zone 0 clauses wait on the state regulation. Mono County's 2008 chapter, still current, carries the identical incorporation sentence, and joins the same watch list. San Francisco, with no wildland to interface with, has a 2025 fire code with zero occurrences of defensible space or wildland anything. When this list was first written, twelve counties were still unread behind blocked or unlocated publishers. All of them have since been read, and the survey tells the story of how each one was finally opened.
San Benito and Yolo: two codes that barely mention fire. San Benito's public health and safety title runs from emergency alarms to fireworks to body art without a fire or vegetation chapter anywhere, and its building title has none either. Yolo's only fire text is a set of administrative amendments to the 2019 Fire Code: who hears appeals, how conflicts resolve. Neither county regulates defensible space at all, let alone the first five feet. Ten counties remain: Alpine, Amador, Colusa, Del Norte, Glenn, Humboldt, Mariposa, Sacramento, Sierra and Solano, every one behind a blocked or unlocated publisher.
Humboldt: a dated negative, read from the archive, and the oldest fire law in the survey. Humboldt's publisher blocks every tool we have, but the Internet Archive holds the publisher's own pages in depth, so we read the county's operative fire chapters from archived copies whose banners date the code precisely, the newest codified through Ordinance 2774 of October 21, 2025. What the code contains: a fire prevention chapter enacted as Ordinance 231 in April 1946, the oldest county fire law we had found until Sierra's, governing burn permits and waste fires; the 1991 fire-safe model (Ordinance 1952, refreshed comprehensively in 2015), whose scope section we read in full, applying only to new development approved in the State Responsibility Area after January 1, 1992, with existing structures expressly exempt; and a nuisance-abatement procedure. Its fuel modification chapter runs to setbacks, vegetation disposal and greenbelts. Nothing regulates the first five feet or fence materials. Three sections had no archived copy and remain unread, named so you can check us: the administration chapter's "Maintenance of Defensible Space Measures" and "Local Responsibility Area Fire Hazard Severity Zones" sections, the latter added to the chapter sometime between 2022 and 2025, and the fuel modification chapter's "Setback for Structure Defensible Space" section. This is a negative as of the archived codification date, not as of today, and that distinction is the honest one. Forty-nine counties are now read; nine remain: Alpine, Amador, Colusa, Del Norte, Glenn, Mariposa, Sacramento, Sierra and Solano.
Sierra: another dated archive negative, and a fire law from 1928. The same archive that unlocked Humboldt holds Sierra County's code publisher in even greater depth, with captures dated through Ordinance 1129 of December 5, 2023. We mapped the code's entire title structure from the archived pages: no fire-safe chapter, no wildland-urban interface chapter, no weed-abatement chapter exists anywhere in it. The county's one fire chapter, read in full, contains five sections: a ban on smoking while traveling through flammable vegetation between June and November, enacted as Ordinance 124 in 1928 and the oldest county fire law in this survey; a fireworks ban from 1952; and an emergency open-fire prohibition from the Dixie Fire summer of 2021, written to expire that November and still sitting in the code. The building chapter adds one real hardening rule, read in full: every new roof, and every roof repair or replacement, must be Class A fire-rated, a requirement that traces to 1980. Nothing anywhere addresses the first five feet, vegetation clearance, or fence materials; in Downieville and Sierra City, two of the most fire-threatened towns in the state, the operative defensible-space law is entirely the state's. The section listing which model codes the county adopts had no archived copy and is named here as unread, along with the real-property nuisance chapter's text. A negative as of the archived codification date. Fifty counties are now read; eight remain: Alpine, Amador, Colusa, Del Norte, Glenn, Mariposa, Sacramento and Solano.
Colusa: rice-country fire law, read from the archive, and Solano half-opened. Colusa County's blocked publisher keeps one page per chapter, and the archive holds the fire chapter as served in March 2024. Read in full, it contains fireworks-stand rules, seasonal smoking prohibitions, and the county's signature provision: every person in possession of land carrying inflammable grain, hay or vegetation must maintain a firebreak at least three feet wide around its outer boundary where it meets other farmland or a highway. That is fire law written for rice and grain country, about crops rather than homes, and it is the county's only vegetation-clearance rule. The weed abatement chapter, from a 2008 capture we flag as dated, is a standard seasonal nuisance regime in which fences appear only as objects to clear around. The building chapter, from an October 2023 capture, adopts the 2016 California Fire Code without local fire amendments. Nothing anywhere addresses the first five feet or fence materials: a negative as of the archived captures. Solano County we could only half-open: its archived building chapter, read in full from a January 2025 capture, adopts the 2022 California Fire Code and the 2021 International Wildland-Urban Interface Code without amendment, adds a summary-abatement power for the Fire Marshal, and requires Class A roofs in the highest hazard zones, but the chapter titled "Abatement of Fire Hazards" has no archived copy under any address we tried, so Solano stays partial rather than surveyed. Fifty-one counties are now read; seven remain: Alpine, Amador, Del Norte, Glenn, Mariposa, Sacramento and Solano.
Amador and Alpine: read in depth, too stale to count, and one sentence that belongs on a watch list. Both counties' blocked publishers have archive coverage, but nothing newer than 2015 for Amador and mostly 2008 for Alpine, and we will not call a county surveyed on a capture that predates the Butte Fire, so both are recorded as partial. What the old text shows is still worth reporting. Amador's fire and life safety chapter, read in full as it stood in 2013, is the 2006 fire-safe model: thirty-foot setbacks and hundred-foot fuel modification for new development, with the county's oldest bone a 1905 thistle ordinance. Alpine's fuels reduction chapter, read in full as it stood in 2008, contains a sentence nobody seems to have noticed: every owner of a building on flammable-covered land must maintain defensible space "in compliance with Public Resources Code Section 4291 as currently exists and as may be amended in the future," enforced by county nuisance abatement with annual deadlines. The ember-resistant zone was later written into that very statute, so if Alpine's chapter still reads this way, its local code will carry Zone 0 the day the state regulation activates it, the same silent flip we track for Calaveras, Contra Costa Fire, Morro Bay, Mono, Inyo and Tehama, whose statute-pointing members carry nearly the identical sentence in text we verified as current. A 2008 capture cannot prove what Alpine's code says in 2026, so this goes on our effective-date watch list as a verify-first item rather than into the verified six, and we said so until the current text was read on August 23, 2026: the chapter's 2018 rewrite kept the sentence, and Alpine is now the verified seventh, per the entry below. Both counties' fuel definitions exclude fences from what must be cleared; the five-foot idea appears in both codes only as the clearance around a campfire.
The last five, read from current text, and the survey completes. On August 23, 2026 the five holdouts were finally read from current sources, and every one moved from unread or partial to surveyed. Solano's never-archived “Abatement of Fire Hazards” chapter holds a fireworks ban and district clearing authority with a cost lien, nothing more; current through April 2026, negative. Sacramento, read from the publisher its county counsel points to, is the 2025 Fire Code with administrative amendments plus a 1984 weed chapter whose thirty-foot firebreak protects “structures, combustible fences, vehicles and combustible storage”, the old law defending the very fence the new law will regulate; code-wide searches for “defensible space”, “ember-resistant” and “4291” return zero; negative. Glenn publishes its own code as PDFs on its county website, and it contains no fire chapter at all, just 1974 weed-abatement machinery and a clean November 2025 adoption of the state building suite; negative. Amador moved publishers, and its current code holds a chapter no archive ever captured: a 2022 defensible-space ordinance that is the only county code in California to use the words “Zone 0”, drawing the zone at five feet and making it a recommendation while thirty and one hundred feet are duties, re-adopted verbatim in March 2026. A recommendation is not a rule in force, so Amador stays off the register, and we would rather explain that distinction than blur it. And Alpine resolved its own watch item: the 2018 rewrite of its fuels chapter kept the dynamic sentence, current through July 2026, so Alpine moves from verify-first to the verified seventh code wired to the state's defensible space law, an eighth, Kensington Fire Protection District's, following the same day. Fifty-eight of fifty-eight.
Fremont becomes the nineteenth row, and it was hiding inside an exhibit. The rumor we carried as unverifiable, an Ordinance 10-2025 behind a publisher that refused every tool, resolves into something bigger once the city's current code could be read. Ordinance 10-2025 (July 15, 2025) adopts Fremont's fire hazard severity zones; Ordinance 12-2025 (September 16, 2025) adopts the 2025 Wildland-Urban Interface Code and, with it, the Fire Department's Defensible Space Inspection Guide, “hereby adopted as part of this ordinance.” That guide is drafted as a full regulatory instrument, inspections, penalties and cost liens included, and its fences subsection is real law: any new combustible fence needs at least six feet of separation from a structure unless the last six feet connecting to it are noncombustible, and nobody in a Very High zone may place a fence of bark, mulch or wood chips within 100 feet of a structure. Six feet, not five: Fremont wrote a stricter connection geometry than the state's. Its Zone 0 vegetation subsection, by contrast, is expressly headed “RECOMMENDATIONS,” the same pattern as Amador. The mandatory fence rule is what puts Fremont on the register; the details are on the Alameda County page.

Sonoma Valley Fire District, in Sonoma County, is worth a line for the same reason. It publishes a page headed “Ember Resistant Zone within 5 feet of structure and attached decks”, which looks like a local rule and is not one. It explains AB 3074, the state statute, and still says the regulation has “not yet been codified”. Useful guidance, no local ordinance behind it.

The effective-day watch list deserves the same discipline in reverse, so here are the five codes we examined for membership and excluded, with the reasons. Trinity defines its vegetation nuisance as an accumulation within one hundred feet "as required by" the state statute, fixing its own geometry rather than deferring. Yuba cites the statute in its purpose clause and then restates the duties in its own words, and a restatement does not inherit. Lassen adopts the state's fire-safe road-and-water regulations in full, a different body of law from the one Zone 0 lands in, and Tuolumne's chapter describes the statute as requiring one hundred feet, anchoring itself to that content. Monterey's fire-code amendment requires defensible space per the statute, but through the triennial code-adoption machinery every county runs, which would make every county a member and the list meaningless. A code joins the watch list only when its own text imposes a duty and defers its content to the state's, because that is the mechanism that flips.

We can now name that machinery instead of gesturing at it, which turns the exclusion into a stated choice rather than a convenience. Section 604.3 of the 2025 California Wildland-Urban Interface Code requires hazardous vegetation and fuels around all buildings and structures to be maintained in accordance with four bodies of law, and one of the four is Title 14 section 1299.03, the section the state's Zone 0 text is being written into. Every jurisdiction that adopts that model code unamended is therefore carrying a pointer with the same shape as the ones on our watch list, handed to it by the state rather than drafted locally. That is precisely why we do not count them. This register lists rules in force, and a pointer at a section that does not require an ember-resistant zone yet is not a rule in force. It also means the watch list is a floor and not a ceiling: the survey quotes 604.3 in full and explains why the mulch half of Zone 0 travels through it more easily than the fence half.

We are also carrying open questions inside the counties we have surveyed. Where a district's ordinance is an image scan with no text layer, or a city code is behind a portal we cannot read, we record that as unverified rather than guessing. Those are listed on each county page under "claims we could not verify", and there is a standing list of what we still do not know about the statewide rule.

Don't see your county? Tell us which one

We add a county when we have something verified to say about it, which usually means a local rule, a grant that names fence work, or a map change. Tell us where you are and we will email you when we publish it. If we look and find nothing is happening where you live, we will tell you that too, because it is worth knowing and it costs you nothing to act on.

Frequently asked questions

Is there an official list of these?

No. That is the point of this page. Ember-resistant zone rules are adopted by individual fire districts and city councils, and no state body compiles them. If one is published we will link to it and say so.

Why did your number keep changing?

Because we kept looking harder. Four, then six, then seven, then twelve, then twenty, then twenty-nine, with nothing changing in California in between. We publish the number we can prove rather than the number we would like, and we would rather tell you the survey is incomplete than imply it is finished.

My jurisdiction has a rule and it is not listed. What now?

Send it to us with a link to the ordinance or code section. We will read the adopted text, verify it, and add it with the date. We do not add jurisdictions on the strength of a news story or a district's summary page.

Does the statewide rule replace these?

Not exactly. Once the statewide regulation takes effect it sets a floor, and local agencies may be more restrictive. Until then it sets nothing, because it has no effective date. The local rules in this table are the only Zone 0 requirements binding anyone in California today.

Sources

Where to go next

Check whether any of them reach you jurisdiction, not county, decides which rule applies.
Read the ordinances in detail the six we cover in detail, with their verbatim fence text.
Track the statewide rule adopted, not yet in effect, and what happens next.
Reporting on this? No state body keeps this list, and this page explains how to check every row against its own adopted text.

Not sure any of this reaches you? Check your address against CAL FIRE's own layers, or walk your first five feet and get a punch list, including the items you do not need to spend money on.