Press

For journalists: what we track, what we have that nobody else does

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

The numbers, ready to lift

Each figure below is counted from the published tables on every build rather than typed, and each comes with the sentence we would stand behind if you quoted it. Counted on October 16, 2026. The register is downloadable as CSV and JSON.

Attribution that fits in a sentence: "according to The Zone Zero Report, an independent tracker that reads each local ordinance from its adopted text (zonezeroreport.com/california-zone-0-register)".

Twelve findings you can build a story on

Each of these is verified against primary text, and each links to the page that carries the full sourcing. Take the finding and go to the primary source; that is what the pages are for.

• Two conditions in the statute have to be met before Zone 0 bites, and one is a written finding about money. Public Resources Code section 4291(g)(1) says the ember-resistant zone requirement "shall not take effect for new structures until the board updates the regulations… and the guidance document," and (e)(2) gives the Board up to a year after adoption to do the guidance half. Section 4291(h) then says the department "shall not change defensible space inspection practices and forms or enforcement to implement the requirement for an ember-resistant zone until the State Fire Marshal makes a written finding, which the State Fire Marshal shall post on the department's internet website, that the Legislature has appropriated sufficient resources to do so." We searched on August 23, 2026 and could not find that finding. It is a public document by statute, so it is checkable by anyone. The tracker, with the nuance that the regulation and the statutory requirement are different instruments.
• The guidance document Zone 0 waits on is from 2006, and it says fences are not fuel. The document the Board posts as its defensible space guidance is the General Guidelines for Creating Defensible Space, adopted February 8, 2006 and approved by the Office of Administrative Law that May. It contains no occurrence of "ember," none of "Zone 0," and none of "five feet," and its definition of Fuel provides that "for the purposes of these guidelines, it does not include fences, decks, woodpiles, trash, etc." That also solves a puzzle from our county survey: Fresno, Alpine and Monterey all exclude the same four things in their own codes, because they were following the state's guidance. Finding one of the survey.
• In CAL FIRE's own model inspection guide, clearing Zone 0 is a criterion and replacing your fence is advice. The Office of the State Fire Marshal's model defensible space program, the guide local agencies use for inspections, has a list headed "Inspection Criteria for Zone 0," and it is fuel removal: items in the first five feet, fuels under decks, no combustible bark or mulch, chimney clearance, dead vegetation, firewood relocated. Fences appear under a separate heading, "Suggestions and Education in Zone 0." That is the state's own division between what gets checked and what gets recommended, and section 4291(h) freezes it until the appropriations finding exists. Both lists, quoted.
• Local rules already bind, and some are stricter than the state text. At least thirty-five jurisdictions, from a fire district that started in 2019 to five cities in one county carrying their county fire department's model fence rule. Paradise requires all fencing within five feet of any structure to be noncombustible, existing fences included, with a compliance certificate required before a sale closes. The register has every citation.
• One county and five of its cities reverse the state repair rule, and three of them adopted it on the same day. The adopted state text expressly permits combustible repairs to an existing combustible fence. Riverside County wrote the opposite into its Section 604.11, and Indio, Indian Wells, Moreno Valley, Menifee and Norco all carry it word for word: replacing any part of a near-house fence run brings the entire run back noncombustible. Indio, Menifee and Norco all adopted on November 19, 2025, which is what a county fire department's model ordinance moving through a code cycle looks like, and Moreno Valley's and Norco's texts cite Riverside County Fire Department Guidelines by name. Moreno Valley's own advisory notice states that the department "has local Zone 0 requirements currently in effect for new buildings and additions to existing buildings." A homeowner reading accurate national coverage of the state repair allowance would get the law in all five places exactly backwards. We found the last three only by searching code libraries for the section number instead of for city names, and Riverside County Fire serves a long list of contract cities, so we do not think five is the end of it. County page, with the ordinance text quoted and three more cities named as unverified leads.
• The statute under the five-year headline says three. SB 504 (Chapter 982, 2024), the statute nobody's history includes, set the existing-home lag at three years in both defensible-space codes. The adopted regulation matches that in the Local Responsibility Area and gives the State Responsibility Area five. The harmonising reading exists, and it is a construction, not something either text says. Tracked as an open question with the chaptered text quoted.
• The best fence sentence in print belongs to a local paper. We check published claims against the rule text on the corrections page, and it cuts both ways: the syndicated national claim that wood fences "must be replaced" fails on scope, extent and timing, while The Press Democrat's rendering is the most accurate we have found. When we have been wrong ourselves, the same page says so.
• Enforcement runs on education, and one town routed around that. The most recent reported year: 248,403 defensible space inspections, 3 citations. Paradise's point-of-sale certificate is the exception that does not wait for an inspector, because escrow does the asking.
• All fifty-eight county codes read, and local wildfire law lives in another era. We read the codified fire and vegetation law of every California county in a single survey: adoption dates run 1928 to 2008, the framework is thirty-five and one hundred feet, and outside the register's jurisdictions the five-foot idea appears in county law three times: a plan-check mandate in San Bernardino, an optional setback trade in Lassen, and one county code, Amador's, that names “Zone 0” just to recommend it. Three of the counties were read from Internet Archive captures of their blocked publishers' own pages, dated by the publishers' banners, two more through a print endpoint their login-gated publisher leaves open, and the last five from current text on August 23, 2026, including one county that publishes its own code as PDFs and one whose supposed publisher hosts nothing at all; the register's ledger tells each story plainly. The survey, with every citation on the register.
• Eight local codes may change meaning on the state rule's effective day, and nobody has told their residents. Calaveras, Contra Costa Fire and Morro Bay incorporate the state's defensible space regulation by reference; Mono, Inyo, Tehama and Alpine impose local duties that defer to the statutes the ember-resistant zone was written into, Alpine's expressly “as may be amended in the future”; and Kensington Fire Protection District points at the statutes, the regulation and their future amendments in one sentence, with recitals saying it intends Zone Zero alignment. On effective day, all eight may begin requiring Zone 0 through their own municipal codes, with no new vote and no announcement. We published the membership test, and the five near-misses we excluded, by name with reasons, so the list can be checked rather than trusted. Finding two of the survey, and every entry on our effective-date checklist.
• The by-reference pointer is pre-printed in the state's own model code, which makes the previous finding much larger than eight. 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 the second is "California Code of Regulations, Title 14, Division 1.5, Chapter 7, Subchapter 3, Article 3, Section 1299.03," the section the Board's Zone 0 package is written into. So a city that adopts the state model code unamended is carrying the same pointer as the eight above, without any local drafter intending it. A deputy city attorney in San Luis Obispo reached that conclusion first, in a staff report advising his council that adopting the WUI code means the city "will also adopt, by reference, the Zone 0 requirements as issued by the state (including any future amendments)." We then read the section and confirmed the text. Two things a reporter should carry with it: section 604.2's third application trigger is land a city itself designated as a wildland-urban interface area, not a state hazard map; and 604.3's duty runs on "hazardous vegetation and fuels," which the Board's own guidance document defines so as to exclude fences, so Zone 0's mulch half travels through 604.3 better than its fence half. Nobody, including us, has counted how many California jurisdictions have adopted the 2025 WUI code, which makes the real size of the silent-flip question an open one. The survey section quoting 604.1 through 604.3.
• California froze local residential building codes until June 2031 and wrote home hardening out of the freeze, which is why local Zone 0 rules can still be adopted at all. Assembly Bill 130 of 2025 amended Health and Safety Code section 17958 so that "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 California Building Standards Code. Six conditions escape the freeze. Two concern wildfire: changes that "relate to home hardening," and building standards that "relate to home hardening and are proposed for adoption by a fire protection district pursuant to Section 13869.7." Every local rule we have added to the register since October 2025 was adopted inside that window. The story for a reporter is the shape of it: the Legislature shut local building-standard amendments down for nearly six years on housing-cost grounds, then left one lane open, and that lane is the first five feet around a house. Section 17958 does not define home hardening, so which provisions qualify is untested, and we say so rather than assuming. The register carries the statutory text, and how local Zone 0 rules actually spread puts the freeze, the model ordinances and the ratification step in one place.

What we will tell you that a source with a stake usually will not

• What the rule does not require. Existing unattached fences within five feet may remain under the state text. Repairs may use wood. The attached-fence requirement is a five-foot span, not a fence. We sell fence products, and we would rather you print what the text says than what a quote-hungry version of us would prefer.
• Which of our numbers is soft. The register count is a fact about how hard we have looked, not about California; we write "at least thirty-five that we have verified" and never "there are thirty-five." Counties surveyed: all fifty-eight, and the register carries the ledger of how.
• What we could not verify. Every county page carries a "claims we could not verify" section, and the register separates "checked, nothing found" from "unreachable," because a page that fails to load and a page with no fence provision produce identical search results.

How to check us, and how to cite us

Every substantive page carries a fact-check date and quotes its sources verbatim, with the citation under the quote. If you find a claim of ours that does not survive contact with the primary text, we want to know, and the correction will run on the page where the error was, dated. Cite us as The Zone Zero Report with the page URL; better still, follow our citation to the primary source and cite that.

For the statewide rule's status on any given day, the tracker is the page we keep current, including through the Office of Administrative Law filing window. If you are on deadline about whether Zone 0 is "law yet," that page is the answer, and it says exactly what is and is not pending.

Take the data, and the citation to go with it

The register is downloadable as CSV and JSON, generated from the published table on every build so the file cannot disagree with the page. The JSON carries the retrieval date, the method and the field definitions.

Paste-ready citation: The Zone Zero Report, California Zone 0 local ordinance register, https://zonezeroreport.com/california-zone-0-register, retrieved [date]. Use is free; we ask for a link so a reader can check any row against the adopting document.

Send us the paragraph before it runs

If you are writing about Zone 0 and want the fence or status sentences checked against the adopted text, send them. We reply the same working day with what the text says and a citation to the section, and nothing else: no quote from us unless you ask for one, no request for a link, no pitch. The three errors we see most are that the statewide rule is already enforceable, which it is not; that every wood fence within five feet must be replaced, when the state text permits combustible repairs and leaves unattached fences alone; and that a fence can be bought "fire rated" as an assembly, which no test in US code supports. We keep the list of published claims that fail, with the text they fail against.

Contact

[email protected]. We answer questions about our sourcing, share the underlying documents we quote from, and correct errors fast. We do not provide anonymous background, because a publication built on named sources should be one.