The tracker

Zone 0 status: adopted, then withdrawn from OAL

Fact-checked September 11, 2026·Updated after every Board of Forestry action·How we verify

Where the statewide rule stands

AB 3074 mandated Zone 0, the ember-resistant zone covering the first five feet around a structure, back in 2020. The statute only takes effect through regulations from the Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, and on August 19, 2026 the Board approved them. Press coverage of the meeting: "The board approved the final draft of its first-in-the-nation 'Zone 0' defensible-space regulations on Wednesday, which are intended to reduce the risk that wind-driven embers will ignite homes during wildfires."

Getting here took two missed schedules. Governor Newsom's Executive Order N-18-25 ordered the rulemaking finished by December 31, 2025; the Board declined to vote that December and paused work into early 2026. A revised draft went through an April 17, 2026 release and a July 23, 2026 workshop before the August package.

Withdrawn from OAL on September 8, 2026

Updated September 11, 2026. The statewide package is no longer in front of the Office of Administrative Law. OAL's table of recent actions on emergency regulations carries file 2026-0828-03E, "Zone 0 Defensible Space", Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, with one entry in its action column: "Withdrawn, September 8, 2026". We read that table directly, and we read the table it left as well. The package is not on the under-review list, and no Board of Forestry filing has taken its place.

The date is the tell, and the arithmetic is public

Government Code section 11349.6 gives OAL a fixed window: "Emergency regulations adopted pursuant to subdivision (b) of Section 11346.1 shall be reviewed by the office within 10 calendar days after their submittal to the office." The package was submitted on Friday, August 28, 2026. Ten calendar days later is Monday, September 7, which was Labor Day. The next business day was Tuesday, September 8, and that is the date on the withdrawal. The filing was pulled on the day OAL's decision was due, not weeks ahead of it.

That is the arithmetic, and we are stopping there. Neither OAL nor the Board has published a reason, a withdrawal letter, or a notice of any kind. A withdrawal on the deadline is consistent with an agency pulling a package it expected to lose, and it is equally consistent with a defect both sides preferred to fix off the clock. We do not know which, and we are not going to guess in public. If either body publishes an explanation, it will appear here the day we read it.

Updated October 4, 2026. Neither body has published one. A third-hand account of the Board's reasoning does now exist, in a non-profit's write-up rather than from the Board, and it points at the second of the two possibilities above. We set out what it says and what it is worth further down this page.

The Board's own site has not said a word

As of October 4, 2026 the Board's Proposed Rule Packages page still lists "Zone 0 Defensible Space" under the heading "These are regulations published for notice of rulemaking and are being considered for adoption by the Board. The regulations have been filed with the Office of Administrative Law", with the August notice and the filed rule text attached and no mention of a withdrawal. If you are checking this yourself, that is the thing to know: OAL's table is the only place the withdrawal is published.

A withdrawal is not the end of a rulemaking

An agency that withdraws a filing can file again, and the same OAL table shows what that looks like. The California School Finance Authority withdrew a package on September 8, 2026, the same day as Zone 0, and a filing from the same agency on the same subject appeared on the under-review table the next day under a new file number. That is an illustration of the mechanism and nothing more. It says nothing about what the Board of Forestry intends. As of October 4, 2026, nothing from the Board has reappeared on OAL's under-review table.

The Board met on September 22 to 24, and Zone 0 was not on the agenda

The Board of Forestry met on September 22, 23 and 24, 2026 at Jamestown. Its meeting notice and agenda carries a posting date of September 11, 2026, three days after the withdrawal, which made it the first document the Board published after it. Zone 0 is not in it. We read the notice itself rather than the meeting page's summary, searched all eight pages, which cover all three days including the Resource Protection Committee session, and found no occurrence of "Zone 0", "Zone Zero", "defensible", "1298", "1299", "Office of Administrative Law" or "OAL". We checked again on September 23. The posted agenda is now a second revision, still carrying the September 11 posting date, and the answer is the same in it.

The regulations item on September 24 lists four rulemaking actions for possible Board action: the Exam Fee Amendments, the Southern Subdistrict and Santa Cruz County noticing rules, the Silvicultural Amendments, and a minor clarity-and-consistency package. Zone 0 is not among them. Public Resources Code 4291 appears once in the document, as a citation to section 4291.5 in the title of a fire prevention report, which is a different statute and a different subject.

That is narrower than it may sound, and we mean it narrowly. Plenty of agency work never appears on an agenda, and we have not established what the Board would have to do procedurally in order to file again. So this is not a claim that nothing happened at the meeting. It is a statement about what was published: no public Board discussion of Zone 0 was noticed for September. Minutes are not out yet, and we will read them when they are.

CAL FIRE has told the Board its staff are updating materials "with the new regulations"

Read September 23, 2026. There is one Zone 0 mention in the September board binder and it is not in the agenda. It is in CAL FIRE's Director's Report to the Board, binder item FULL 6, on page 16 of 19, in the Office of the State Fire Marshal's wildfire risk reduction and preparedness section. It is a heading with one bullet under it, and this is the whole of it:

"Zone 0
Staff are working to update websites, informational handouts, self-surveys, and multiple training curriculums with the new regulations."

Those three words, "the new regulations", describe a statewide Zone 0 rule that is not in effect and that has no filing before OAL. We are reporting what the document says and not one inch more than that, so here is what it does not establish. This is CAL FIRE, the department, and not the Board of Forestry, which is the body that makes this rule. It names no file number, no effective date and no compliance deadline. The report's enforcement section elsewhere covers August 6 to September 10, 2026, a window that straddles the September 8 withdrawal, so we cannot tell you when the bullet was written. And an agency preparing training material for a rule it expects to file again is not doing anything inconsistent with that rule not being in force today.

What makes it worth recording is that it is new. We pulled the Director's Reports for July and August 2026 and searched both: neither has a Zone 0 heading, and neither contains "Zone 0", "Zone Zero", "ember-resistant", "1298" or "1299" anywhere. The September report is the first one that does, and it went to the Board fifteen days after the filing was withdrawn. If you are a homeowner or a contractor reading state-agency material in the months ahead, that is the thing to carry with you: no statewide Zone 0 rule is in force, whatever the handout in your hand was written to describe.

One other document in the same binder invites a wrong conclusion, so we will say plainly that it is not one. The Board's own rulemaking matrix, binder item FULL 8(e), updated September 16, carries a row for "Ember Resistant Zone 0" with every date column blank and a status of "Within ZZRA Discussion". That reads like a package reset to nothing. It is not a change. The August matrix, published before the withdrawal and while the filing was live at OAL, says exactly the same thing in the same row. This matrix has never carried the package's OAL dates, so nothing can be inferred from their absence now. ZZRA is the Zone Zero Regulatory Advisory Committee, which we could not expand from the binder when we first wrote this on September 23 and are no longer guessing at: the Board's own Defensible Space page describes it as "a special advisory committee of the Board of Forestry and Fire Protection", established in 2025 and tasked with developing the zero to five foot ember-resistant zone regulations under Public Resources Code 4291 and Executive Order N-18-25. Its three listed members are Terrence O'Brien as chair, Elicia Goldsworthy and J. Lopez. So the matrix row places Zone 0 with that committee, which is where it sat before the withdrawal too.

Two things are unchanged by any of this, and they are the two that actually bind people today. The local ordinances in the register are adopted by cities and fire districts under their own authority, and a state filing being withdrawn does not touch them. The insurance rule below is a Department of Insurance regulation and has been binding since 2022.

The Board now says the package is in "final review" at OAL. OAL's record says it was withdrawn

Read September 27, 2026. The Board's Defensible Space page, the same page that now carries the guidance document, has a paragraph on it that we had not seen before. In full:

"The Board and Board staff continue to work with the Office of Administrative Law on a final review of the Zone 0 Regulations Rule Package. We will update this page when this review is complete and when the California Secretary of State publishes the final regulation."

Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, Defensible Space Zones 0, 1 and 2, read September 27, 2026

We checked OAL the same morning. File 2026-0828-03E still appears on Recent Actions Taken on Emergency Regulations with one entry against it, "Withdrawn, September 8, 2026". The Emergency Regulations Under Review table carries no Zone 0 row and no Board of Forestry row of any kind. So there is no review at OAL to complete, in the sense that OAL's own published tables recognise. The package that was before it was pulled nineteen days ago and nothing has replaced it.

Both things can be literally true at once and we want to be precise about how. "Continue to work with the Office of Administrative Law" can describe informal consultation between an agency and OAL staff about a package they intend to refile, and that sort of contact leaves no trace on either table. It is the phrase "a final review of the Zone 0 Regulations Rule Package" that does the damage, because to an ordinary reader it describes a pending official review with a decision at the end of it, and no such review is pending. Nor does the paragraph mention the withdrawal at all. A homeowner or a contractor who reads that page and no other comes away believing the rule is in the last stage before publication.

We are not going to tell you which reading the Board intended, because we do not know, and we have asked nobody. What we can do is put the two records side by side and date both, which is the whole job here. If the Board refiles, OAL's under-review table is where it will show up, and the same morning it does this page will say so.

Worth holding onto: this is the third state-agency document in two weeks that describes the Zone 0 rule in the present tense while no rule is in force. CAL FIRE's Director's Report to the Board, published for the September 22 meeting, has staff updating handouts and training "with the new regulations". The guidance document above is dated September 2026 and adopted. And now this. None of them is wrong about the Board having voted on August 19. All of them would leave a reader thinking something is in effect, and nothing is.

How it got there: filed with OAL on August 28, 2026

Written August 29, 2026, and kept here as the record. The package had been filed, and it sat on the Office of Administrative Law's Emergency Regulations Under Review table from August 28 until it was withdrawn on September 8. We read the entry directly at the time rather than taking anyone's word for it:

Two details in that row are worth reading rather than skipping. The package adopts the 1298 sections, which are the Local Responsibility Area rules, and amends the 1299 sections, which are the State Responsibility Area rules. That is the two-track structure this site keeps describing, visible in the filing itself. And sections 1299.04 and 1299.05 are not in the list, which is consistent with what we concluded earlier about 1299.05 going nowhere.

The comment window, which closed on September 2

The Board's notice requires comments to reach OAL "within five (5) calendar days of OAL's posting of the proposed emergency regulations on the OAL website." That is why this date was hedged here until now: the clock runs from OAL's posting, not from the Board's filing, and neither was confirmed. Both are now. OAL's table carries the package as filed August 28, and OAL's own page states that "notice of the filing of a proposed emergency rulemaking is posted on this site the day the emergency action is filed with OAL" unless otherwise indicated, with no contrary indication on this entry. The same page states that "OAL must allow five calendar days for public comments after posting a notice." Five calendar days from August 28 is September 2, 2026, which is the date the Board itself computed. That window opened on August 28 and closed on September 2, 2026. It is described here in the past tense because it is over, and because the filing it attached to was withdrawn on September 8: there is no longer a package at OAL for a comment to reach. Anything below about how to comment is kept as a record of what the requirements were, and as a guide to what they would be again if the Board refiles. Do not send a comment on file 2026-0828-03E now. It would arrive about a rulemaking that OAL is no longer reviewing.

The requirements are set out in full further down this page, and the one that decides whether a comment counts is worth repeating here: under Title 1 of the California Code of Regulations, sections 55(b)(1) through (4), the comment must state on its face that it is about an emergency regulation and name the topic. Comments go to [email protected], with a copy to the Board's contact person.

A skeleton, if the requirements are what is stopping you

Everything above is a rule about form, and form is what disqualifies a comment rather than content. So here is a structure with the compulsory parts filled in and the rest left to you. We have deliberately written no argument into it. This site has no position on what you should say, and the blank is the blank on purpose.

Subject: Public comment on emergency regulation, OAL File No. 2026-0828-03E

This is a public comment on an emergency regulation. The topic of the
emergency is Zone 0 defensible space: the Board of Forestry and Fire
Protection's adoption of Title 14 sections 1298.01 through 1298.04 and
amendment of sections 1299.01 through 1299.03, OAL File No. 2026-0828-03E.

[Your comment.]

Name:
City or county:
Date:

The first paragraph is doing specific work and is the part not to edit. Title 1 of the California Code of Regulations, section 55(b), requires a comment to state on its face that it concerns an emergency regulation and to name the topic of the emergency. A comment that does not may not be counted as one. The file number is not required by that section, but it costs nothing and removes any doubt about which package you mean.

Then send it twice, because one copy is not compliance. To the Office of Administrative Law at [email protected], by fax to (916) 323-6826, or by post to the OAL Reference Attorney, 300 Capitol Mall, Suite 1250, Sacramento, California 95814. And a copy to the agency's named contact person, Tony Andersen, Executive Officer, Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, P.O. Box 944246, Sacramento.

One last thing worth knowing before you spend an evening on it, and it is the Board's own wording rather than ours: "The Board is not required and, in this instance, not likely to respond to comments submitted." OAL's job at this stage is to decide whether the package satisfies the Administrative Procedure Act, so a comment addressed to that question travels further than a general opinion about wildfire policy.

The text that was actually filed is now public

Everything this site has quoted from the regulation carried the same caveat: the August 19 package in the board binder was the pre-meeting deliberative draft, and no certified text had been released, so amendments made from the floor would not have appeared in it. The Board has now posted the rule text as filed, as "Zone 0 Rule Plead" on its proposed rule packages page.

We read it against our own quotations on August 29, 2026. Every fence provision we have published matches the filed text word for word, including the attachment trigger in (9)(A), the new-fence ban in (9)(B) with its "whether attached or parallel" parenthetical, and the repair allowance in (9)(C). So do the phase-in clocks: existing structures in the Local Responsibility Area get three years, extendable to five on a timeline set by the local fire agency, while in the State Responsibility Area they get five, on a timeline set by the Director that "shall not be less than three (3) years." Fences sit in the last phase on both tracks.

Two things we flagged as defects are still there, which is the more interesting result. The potted-plant provisions still disagree across the two tracks: the Local Responsibility Area text uses the defined term "Noncombustible pots or containers" while its State Responsibility Area twin still reads the undefined "non-Combustible". And section 1299.02 still carries two definitions both lettered (b), "Combustible" and "Building or Structure". Neither was cleaned up before filing, so OAL is reviewing them as they stand. Our open questions page tracks both.

One limit, since it is the same one we have been careful about all along: a filed emergency package is what the agency submitted, and OAL can still disapprove it or return it for defects. It is the best text available and it is not yet the final word.

Adopted is not the same as in effect

This is the distinction most coverage blurs. The Board's approval started the next stage rather than ending the process, and that stage then stopped:

Corrected September 27, 2026. Until today this table's third row read "Open now, closes September 2, 2026" for the OAL comment period, and its fourth row gave Secretary of State publication as "Pending". Both were true when the table was written on August 29 and both were false from September 8, when the filing was withdrawn. They stayed up for nineteen days on the page whose entire subject is other people's stale status claims. The rest of this page, including the banner, the per-page status note and the section above, was corrected on September 11; this table was missed because our stale-window guard reads sentences and the claim was split across two table cells. The guard now reads tables too. Our corrections page lists this.

CAL FIRE's own homeowner site agrees

We do not have to rely on our own reading for this. On August 20, 2026, the day after the vote, CAL FIRE's homeowner-facing Ready for Wildfire defensible space page said, in the agency's own voice:

"Zone 0 extends 5 feet from buildings, structures, decks, etc. While not legally required yet, Zone 0 is key for wildfire defense and preventing fires from spreading to your home."

The same page draws the contrast itself. Of the outer zones it says: "Zones 1 & 2: These zones cover up to 100 feet around your home. They're required by law and involve varying levels of vegetation management." Required by law for Zones 1 and 2; not legally required yet for Zone 0. That is the distinction this whole tracker exists to hold, stated by the agency that will enforce it.

Two caveats we owe you. The page carries no last-updated stamp, so it may simply predate the August 19 vote rather than reflect a considered post-adoption position. And a homeowner guidance page is not a legal instrument: it is corroboration, not authority. The authority is the absence of the text from the California Code of Regulations, which we checked separately.

Even the Board's own page has not caught up

Superseded on September 27, 2026, and kept as the record. The page described below has since changed twice over. It now carries the September 2026 guidance document and a paragraph saying the Board continues to work with OAL on "a final review". Both are covered above: the guidance and the final-review paragraph. What follows is what that page said on August 25 and is left here unedited.

Checked again on August 25, 2026, six days after the vote. The Board of Forestry's Defensible Space, Zones 0, 1 and 2 page still reads, in the future tense:

"The Board will consider adoption of a final draft of Zone 0 regulations at the August 19th Board meeting"

No certified “as adopted” text has been posted anywhere either. On the August 25 check, the words “adopted”, “approved” and “effective” do not appear anywhere on that page, and the only Zone 0 document it links for the August 19 meeting is the summary and rule pleading from the pre-meeting binder. We are not scoring a point off a slow web page. We are showing you why a page like this one exists. If the agency that adopted the rule has not yet updated its own description of it, then the answer to "is Zone 0 the law?" is not sitting anywhere obvious, and a homeowner searching for it today can very reasonably come away with the wrong impression in either direction. That is the gap this tracker is trying to close, and it is dated for exactly that reason.

Also confirmed on August 21: the OAL emergency-regulations table gained two new filings that day, both from the State Water Resources Control Board. Neither is this package.

The Board has now named two dates

On August 20, 2026, the day after the vote, the Board issued its Notice of Proposed Emergency Action. It is the first document to put dates on what happens next, and it hedges every one of them:

"The Board adopted the emergency regulations at its regular meeting on August 19, 2026 and plans on submitting them to the Office of Administrative Law (“OAL”) on or after August 28, 2026."

"This regulation will likely be submitted to the Office of Administrative Law on or after August 28, 2026. If the regulation is submitted to OAL on that date and is posted on its website, the public comment period will close on September 2, 2026."

Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, Notice of Proposed Emergency Action, Zone 0 Defensible Space, Notice Date August 20, 2026, pages 1 and 2

Read the hedges, not just the dates. "On or after", "plans on", "likely" and "if" are all the Board's own words. August 28 was the earliest the package could go to OAL, not a commitment, and September 2 was conditional on the filing happening exactly then and being posted the same day. We checked OAL's pending emergency table on August 29, 2026, and the package was on it then, filed August 28 as file number 2026-0828-03E, which satisfied both halves of that condition and settles the close of comment at September 2. It settles nothing else: neither date is an effective date, and neither starts any compliance clock. The details are at the top of this page.

One thing this notice settles cleanly: it is the Board itself, in a filing document, saying it "adopted the emergency regulations at its regular meeting on August 19, 2026." That is a better source for the adoption date than any news report.

A third date, and the five days in which anyone can comment

Added August 25, 2026. A day after we last updated this page, the California Special Districts Association published an account of the August 19 hearing that puts a fuller timeline in public than the Board's own notice does. It is a trade association reporting on a meeting, not a Board filing, so we are giving it to you as that. What it adds is a third date:

• August 28: regulatory text submitted to the Office of Administrative Law, and the five-day public comment period begins.
• September 2: the comment period closed and OAL began its final review.
• September 7: OAL review of the rulemaking package is expected to be completed.

California Special Districts Association, "Board of Forestry and Fire Protection Advances Phased Approach to Zone Zero Compliance," posted August 24, 2026.

The first two match the Board's own notice. The third is new, and it is the one worth having, because September 7 is the first published estimate of when the last procedural step is expected to finish. It is an expectation rather than a deadline, and OAL can disapprove a package or return it for defects, but if you have been asking when this could actually become law, that date is the current answer to aim at.

There is now an account of why, and it is third-hand

Read October 4, 2026. This page has said since September 11 that nobody has published a reason for the withdrawal. That is still true of the Board and of OAL. It is no longer the whole picture, because one account exists, and a reader deserves both the account and its weight.

Wildfire Los Angeles, a publication of the fire-safety non-profit MySafe:LA, carried a piece on the withdrawal on September 11, 2026, bylined "MySafe:LA PIO". One sentence in it is the only explanation we have found anywhere:

"Information subsequently provided by the Board indicates that the withdrawal is procedural, allowing the Board to address technical edits and questions before resubmitting."

Wildfire Los Angeles, September 11, 2026

The article also says that an exact timetable for resubmission has not been provided. As of today nothing has been resubmitted: OAL's under-review table still carries no Zone 0 row.

Now the weight, and we are going to be blunt about it because the whole value of this page is that we are. That sentence is not a quotation. It names no person at the Board, gives no date for when the Board said it, and points at no document. "Information subsequently provided" could describe an email, a phone call or a remark at a meeting, and we cannot tell which. We have not spoken to MySafe:LA and we are not suggesting they invented it; they are a serious organisation and a reporter paraphrasing a straight answer from an agency is ordinary practice. It simply is not the same kind of thing as a document, and this site's entire method is to tell you which kind of thing you are looking at.

What we can check, we checked today. The Board has published nothing about the withdrawal on any surface of its own. Its News Releases and Announcements page carries a Zone 0 press release dated August 19, 2026 headed "Board Approves First-in-the-Nation Zone 0 Policy at August Meeting", and nothing since. Its Defensible Space page says the Board "continue[s] to work with the Office of Administrative Law on a final review", which is not the same claim and does not mention a withdrawal either. OAL has published the fact and no reason.

So here is where we land, and it is a narrower place than "the Board has explained itself". On September 11 we said a withdrawal on the decision deadline was consistent with two things, an agency pulling a package it expected to lose and a defect both sides preferred to fix off the clock, and that we would not guess between them in public. There is now third-hand support for the second, from a non-profit rather than from the Board, uncorroborated by any document. That moves our confidence a little and it changes nothing we have told you about the law: no statewide rule is in force, no clock is running, and a resubmission that has been promised to a third party with no date attached is not a filing. If the Board publishes a reason, or refiles, this page will say so the morning we read it.

And a line of our own we should not have written. Our feed entry of September 11 ended "No news outlet has reported the withdrawal as of tonight." The Wildfire Los Angeles piece is dated that same day. We cannot establish whether it went up before or after we published, so we are not claiming we were beaten and not claiming we were not. The problem is the sentence itself: it is a negative claim about the entire press, we had no way to verify it, and one search four days later would have turned up the exception. We have left the entry as written, because dated entries here are a record and rewriting them to flatter us is the real offence, but we are noting it here and we will not make that shape of claim again. What we can say honestly is narrower and still worth saying: three weeks on, mainstream coverage of the withdrawal remains very thin, and several pages that rank well for Zone 0 searches still describe the rule as heading for approval.

There is no Board meeting in October. The next one is November 4 and 5

Read October 1, 2026. The obvious question after the September meeting came and went without Zone 0 on it is when the Board next sits. The answer is not next month. The Board's published 2026 schedule lists "October No Meeting" in terms. The remaining dates this year are November 4 and 5 at the Resources Building in Sacramento, and December 8 and 9 at the same place. September was the last of the three travel meetings.

Read that narrowly, because it is narrow. It does not mean nothing can happen in October. We have not established what the Board would have to do procedurally to put this package back in front of OAL, and we are not going to assume it needs a public meeting to do it: the original filing on August 28 followed the August 19 vote by nine days and was an administrative act. What the schedule does tell you is that there will be no noticed public Board discussion of anything in October, so if the package moves next month, OAL's under-review table is where it will show up first, and this page will say so the morning we read it.

The guidance document has been published, with the effective date left blank

The same account records something we had been watching for. Alongside the regulations, the Board "also considered draft guidance on establishing and maintaining defensible space in Zones 0, 1, and 2."

That matters because of the statutory gate described further down this page. Public Resources Code section 4291(g)(1) provides that the ember-resistant zone requirement does not take effect for new structures until the Board updates both the regulations and its guidance document, and the guidance document the Board currently posts is the General Guidelines for Creating Defensible Space, adopted February 8, 2006, which never uses the word ember and defines fuel so as to exclude fences.

Written August 25, 2026, and kept as the record. A draft exists, or existed in front of the Board six days ago. It is not published. We checked the Board's Defensible Space page again on August 25, 2026, and the only guidance document it links is still the same 2006 PDF, at the same address we cited before. No draft, no redline, no date. Until that changes, the second half of the statutory precondition is exactly where it was. We will link it the day it appears.

It has appeared, and this is the link: September 27, 2026. The Board's Defensible Space page now carries Guidance for establishing and maintaining defensible space for Zones 0-2, forty pages, dated September 2026. It was not on that page when we checked on August 25, and we cannot tell you which day between then and now it went up. The 2006 General Guidelines are still linked further down the same page.

Read the title page before anything else, because the Board has said something there that this tracker has been saying for six weeks, and said it in the starkest form available. Under the title, three lines:

"Adopted by the State Board of Forestry and Fire Protection on August 19, 2026
Effective date of updated Zone Zero Regulations: __________, 2026
(This document will be officially published on the future effective date of the Zone 0 regulations.)"

The effective date is a blank line. The Board printed the underscores and the comma and the year and left the date out, because there is no date to put in it. The document also says of itself that it "will be officially published on the future effective date", so what sits on the Board's website today is a document describing itself as not yet officially published. Its first footnote sets out the same mechanism we have: "The effective date is the date the regulations are filed with the Secretary of State, following approval by the Office of Administrative Law."

Whether posting it satisfies the Public Resources Code 4291(g)(1) precondition described above is a legal question and we are not going to answer it. A document that declares itself unpublished is not obviously a published one. What we can tell you is that the thing we said we would link the day it appeared has appeared, that it is dated the month after the withdrawal, and that it carries no effective date because there is none to carry.

The guidance flattens the two compliance clocks, the way we once got wrong ourselves

The guidance closes with an appendix comparing activities, compliance dates and citations, and fences and gates get three rows in it. All three carry the same compliance date, and it is the Local Responsibility Area formula reproduced verbatim: "Within 3 years, or 5 years if local agency/CAL FIRE sets timeline". The three are removing combustible fences and gates attached to a structure or within a foot of it, ensuring attached fences and gates have a five-foot noncombustible span from the point of attachment, and the bar on new combustible fences or gates with repairs allowed in the same material.

That is one clock. The adopted rule text has two, and they run opposite ways. We re-read the August 19 rule pleading today rather than repeat our own note on it, and the file is byte for byte the one we read on August 20, MD5 58274a85700def2b1e1313d784fb45f7. It says:

"Existing Occupied Structures must comply with provisions 1298.04(b)(6)-(10) within three (3) years of the effective date of these regulations, or within five (5) years from the effective date of these regulations, on a timeline set by the local agency responsible for fire protection."

14 CCR 1298.04(c)(4), the Local Responsibility Area track

"Existing Buildings or Structures must comply with provisions 1299.03(d)(6)-(10) within five (5) years from the effective date of these regulations, or on a timeline set by the Director, which shall not be less than three (3) years from the effective date of these regulations."

14 CCR 1299.03(e)(4), the State Responsibility Area track

The defaults are inverted. In the Local Responsibility Area the clock starts at three years and a local agency may stretch it to five. In the State Responsibility Area it starts at five, and only the Director may move it, and never below three. The guidance's single row prints the LRA formula and applies it to both tracks, citing both. For a homeowner in the State Responsibility Area that reads as a three-year deadline where the regulation gives five, and it inverts who has to act: under the rule those five years are theirs by default, while the guidance's phrasing makes five sound like something an agency has to grant them.

We are flagging this rather than scoring it, for two reasons. The first is that we made exactly this mistake. Every phase-in sentence on this site once carried the LRA wording to every reader regardless of track, and we corrected it across six pages on August 20, 2026. It is an easy error, and the two provisions sit forty pages apart. The second is that nothing turns on it today: the guidance is guidance and not the regulation, the regulation is not in effect, and no clock of either length is running. It will matter on the day one starts.

A third figure appears in the guidance's prose rather than its table. The section headed "Considerations for fences" says that where a fence or gate is attached to an occupied structure, "the regulations require a noncombustible gate or panel to be installed within five years of the Zone 0 regulation adoption." Adoption was August 19, 2026. Every clock in the regulation, and every footnote in this same appendix, runs from the effective date instead. We read that as loose drafting rather than a third rule, but we note it because a reader who found only that sentence would come away with a date the rule text does not support.

The Board says the guidance precondition exists, in its own filing

Everything this site has published about that precondition has rested on us reading Public Resources Code section 4291(g)(1) and noticing what it says. Reading the Board's Notice of Proposed Emergency Action closely on August 25, 2026 turned up the Board stating it itself, in the document it is filing with the Office of Administrative Law:

"Both authorizing statutes require the Board to update a guidance document to reflect the new regulations. Under Public Resources Code section 4291(g)(1) and Government Code section 51186(b)(2)(A), the requirements for new structures shall not take effect until the Board updates and posts a defensible space guidance document."

Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, Notice of Proposed Emergency Action, Zone 0 Defensible Space.

Two things follow. The first is that this is no longer our inference. The agency writing the rule says the requirements for new structures do not take effect until it updates and posts the guidance document, which as of tonight it has not.

The second is a citation we did not have. We had been describing this as a single statutory gate in Public Resources Code section 4291(g)(1), which governs the State Responsibility Area. Government Code section 51186(b)(2)(A) is its twin on the other track, the Local Responsibility Area, and the Board cites both. So the precondition is not a quirk of one statute that a reader might hope the other side escapes. It sits on both, which is what "both authorizing statutes" means, and it is why we keep saying that the guidance document is the thing to watch rather than a footnote about one.

How to watch this yourself

Everything on this page comes off two OAL pages, and the second one is the one people miss. A package awaiting a decision sits on Emergency Regulations Under Review, which lists the date submitted, the file number, the agency, the subject, the CCR sections affected and a contact person. When OAL approves or disapproves it, or the agency pulls it, the package leaves that table and the outcome appears on Recent Actions Taken on Emergency Regulations, in a column headed "OAL Action and Date of Action".

Read both, every time, and read them in that order. A package that has vanished from the first table has not gone quiet: it has been decided, and the second table says how. That is exactly what happened here. On September 11, 2026 we found file 2026-0828-03E gone from the under-review table and present on the actions table reading "Withdrawn, September 8, 2026". Checking only the first page would have shown an empty result and told us nothing, which is the failure this site would otherwise have shipped: three days of telling every reader that a decision was still coming.

Two cautions if you are following along. Neither page prints a "last updated" stamp, so a page that looks unchanged may simply not have been refreshed yet, and the only honest reading is of what it shows rather than of what its silence implies. And the Board of Forestry's own site is not a substitute for either: as of September 11, 2026 it still presents the Zone 0 package as filed with OAL, with no notice of the withdrawal on it.

Staff said they would submit an emergency rulemaking package to the Office of Administrative Law immediately after approval. The Board's own July memo describes what happens next: "Under the emergency rulemaking provisions established by Assembly Bill 1455 (2025), OAL will conduct an expedited review to determine whether the regulations satisfy the requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act. Following the public comment period, an upon OAL approval and filing with the Secretary of State, the regulations would become effective immediately. Assuming the anticipated review timeline, staff expect the regulations could become effective as early as September 2026." We will post the effective date here the day it is set, and not before.

Two things we are not going to tell you, because they have not been published: the vote count, and whether anything was amended on the floor. Coverage reports that a vote happened and does not mention amendments. That is not the same as confirmation, and we will wait for the certified text rather than guess. We keep a standing list of everything in the adopted package that is still unresolved: what we still don’t know about the rule.

On scale, NPR put it this way: "The rules will apply to new construction right away, but will be phased in for existing structures, affecting almost 2 million homes in high-risk areas." And on how far off the deep end of the clock sits: "For existing homes, the new vegetation rules will go into effect in 2029 at the earliest."

So the honest answer to "do I have to do something now?" is no, not because of the state rule. What is genuinely live today is your local ordinance if you have one, and the insurance credit, which has been binding on insurers since 2022.

What the Board's own decision memo says about how much moved

That caveat is narrower than it was, because the memo staff wrote for the August meeting says what changed between the committee draft and the package the Board voted on. The Advisory Committee "voted unanimously to forward the draft regulation to the full Board" on June 16, 2026. Since then, the memo says, "staff have made only limited technical, formatting, and conforming revisions to improve clarity and consistency," and "with the exception of changes to ensure alignment with current law, no major substantive amendments to the rule package have been made since the June 2026 version recommended by the Advisory Committee."

So the residual risk is narrower than "the text might be anything": it is whatever happened on the floor on August 19, on top of a package the Board's own staff described as substantively unchanged since June. The memo also names, in staff's own summary of the revisions, what the drafting was aimed at: to "clarify treatment expectations for trees and fences, establish phased implementation for existing structures, and recognize the need for local variation where jurisdictions can demonstrate substantially similar fire protection outcomes." It calls the runway "the recommended five-year implementation period," which is the same outer bound the summary document describes and the timeline page now uses.

One thing in the memo we had not seen anywhere else: alongside the regulation there is a 2026 Guidance Document, and staff said they would "add language to the 2026 Guidance Document to align with the CWUI provisions related to new trees, to avoid confusion for homeowners." Guidance is what an inspector hands you at the door, so we will read that document when it is published and say whether it matches the rule.

Two more conditions the statute sets, and we cannot find either one satisfied

Every account of what happens next, including ours until today, describes two steps: Office of Administrative Law review, then publication by the Secretary of State. Reading Public Resources Code section 4291 as it now stands, amended by AB 1455 and effective October 13, 2025, there are two further conditions written into the statute itself, and neither is being counted anywhere we can find.

One: the guidance document. Subdivision (e)(2) requires the Board, in consultation with the State Fire Marshal, to update its fuels-management guidance document to reflect the new regulations "no later than one year after the board adopts regulations." Subdivision (g)(1) then says the ember-resistant zone requirement "shall not take effect for new structures until the board updates the regulations… and the guidance document." The Board's own homeowner FAQ says the same thing in plainer words: "Once the regulations and the statutorily required guidance document are finalized, Zone 0 will immediately apply to all new construction." The August decision memo refers to a "2026 Guidance Document" and says staff would add language to it about new trees. And we can now tell you exactly which document has to be updated, because it is posted where the statute says it should be. It is the General Guidelines for Creating Defensible Space, "Adopted by BOF on February 8, 2006" and "Approved by Office of Administrative Law on May 8, 2006." We read it on August 23, 2026. It is a thirty-foot-firebreak document: fuel separation, dead and dying wood, down logs, pruning heights. It contains no occurrence of the word "ember," none of "Zone 0," and none of "five feet." Its definition of "Fuel" says, in terms, that "for the purposes of these guidelines, it does not include fences, decks, woodpiles, trash, etc."

Sit with that for a second, because it is the cleanest statement of where California actually is. The document the statute makes a precondition for the ember-resistant zone is twenty years old and expressly excludes fences from the definition of fuel. The Board has up to a year from adoption to rewrite it, and staff have said the guidance is also where the recognition of "good-faith progress toward compliance" will live rather than in the regulation. So the guidance document is not a footnote to this rule. It is where the enforcement grace, the tree provisions and the fence's status as fuel all get settled.

Be careful with what that does and does not mean, because the two instruments are different. The regulation can complete its own emergency-rulemaking path and be filed. The statutory requirement in subdivision (a)(1) is the thing subdivision (g)(1) conditions on both updates being done. We are not telling you the rule cannot take effect; we are telling you the statute attaches the requirement's start for new structures to a second document, and that document is not one anybody is tracking. It also matters for the clock everyone quotes: subdivision (g)(2) gives existing structures three years "after the effective date for the new structures," so the existing-home countdown starts from a date that depends on the guidance document too.

Two: a written finding about money. Subdivision (h) is the one we did not expect. In full: "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." So the inspection form an inspector fills out at your gate, and enforcement of Zone 0 generally, is gated on a public document signed by the State Fire Marshal certifying that the money exists. We searched for that finding on August 23, 2026 and could not locate it. It is exactly the kind of thing that should be easy to check, because the statute says where it goes: the department's own website.

This is the least dramatic and most useful fact on this page. If you are being told that Zone 0 enforcement starts the moment the rule is filed, the statute names a document that has to exist first, and we cannot find it. If it is published, we will link it here the day we see it. If you find it before we do, tell us and we will correct this section with your citation.

The map bill that was vetoed, on cost

There is a second document about money, and it is a veto message. We add it here because the same theme runs through both, and because it decides something more basic than what Zone 0 requires: it decides who is on the map at all. In the Local Responsibility Area, Zone 0 applies only in a Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone, so the criteria for drawing those zones decide the rule's reach.

Senate Bill 629 (Durazo, 2025) would have changed those criteria. It proposed to amend Government Code sections 51178, 51181 and 65302, add section 51179.5, and amend Public Resources Code sections 4202 and 4204, creating a "post-wildfire safety area" designation and requiring the Office of the State Fire Marshal to fold new criteria into its hazard mapping, including land inside the perimeter of a wildfire that burned 1,000 or more acres and destroyed more than ten structures. It passed the Assembly on September 12, 2025 and the Senate on September 13, 2025, and was enrolled on September 18.

Governor Newsom vetoed it on October 11, 2025. From the veto message:

"I remain strongly supportive of this work and the work of OSFM to enhance its modeling capabilities and maintain updated, robust FHSZs to further inform wildfire mitigation measures. This work is actively underway, and though I find this bill's intent laudable, it presents new, ongoing, and significant costs to the state not accounted for in this year's budget."

Governor's veto message on Senate Bill 629, October 11, 2025. The Senate had the veto pending from October 11, 2025; the veto was sustained and the bill stricken from file on March 2, 2026, so it is dead.

Read it beside subdivision (h) above. One statute says CAL FIRE may not change its Zone 0 inspection practices until the State Fire Marshal certifies the Legislature funded it, and we cannot find that certification. One veto says a bill expanding the hazard maps could not be signed because it carried costs the budget did not account for. Neither is an argument about whether ember-resistant zones work; both are about who pays. That is the quietest and most reliable predictor we have found of how fast any of this actually arrives at your address, and it is why we keep saying that adoption and enforcement are different questions.

What this does not mean: SB 629 was not a Zone 0 bill and its veto did not weaken the Zone 0 regulation, which the Board adopted separately on August 19, 2026. The hazard maps in force are the ones the Office of the State Fire Marshal issued under the existing criteria, and those are what you should check your own address against.

The timeline so far

• 2020: AB 3074 signed. Public Resources Code §4291 now requires an ember-resistant zone "based on regulations promulgated by the board."
• November 5, 2021: Laguna Beach’s Zone 0 defensible space guideline (Ordinance 1664) takes effect for existing structures in its Very High zone.
• October 14, 2022: "Safer from Wildfires" insurance regulation operative: insurers pricing wildfire risk must credit noncombustible fences and gates within 5 feet.
• March 17, 2023: Moraga-Orinda Fire District adopts its all-structures local Zone 0. (Ventura County’s fire district has required Zone 0 for new buildings since April 2019.)
• January 2025: Palisades and Eaton fires. IBHS surveyors later find more than 95% of examined parcels had a fence, most of them wood.
• February 6, 2025: Executive Order N-18-25 orders rulemaking done by December 31, 2025.
• March 1, 2025: Ventura County FPD’s full noncombustible Zone 0 takes effect for new buildings, additions, and new landscaping.
• December 2025: The Board declines to vote and pauses work. The deadline passes.
• February 28, 2026: San Diego's ordinance takes effect for new structures.
• April 17, 2026: Revised state draft released.
• July 23, 2026: July draft workshop. Two fence-relevant changes: "parallel" fences added to the new-fence prohibition, and "noncombustible" formally defined as passing ASTM E136.
• August 19, 2026: The Board of Forestry approved the statewide Zone 0 regulation. Six years after AB 3074, and eight months after the executive-order deadline it missed.
• Next: Office of Administrative Law review, including a five-day public comment period, then publication by the Secretary of State. Staff expected the emergency path could make the rules effective as early as September 2026. No date is set.
• February 28, 2027: San Diego's existing-structures phase begins, independent of the state rule.
• Effective date + 3 or 5 years: For existing homes, the phase covering fences, gates, outbuildings and vegetation buffers. The two tracks run opposite clocks: in the Local Responsibility Area it is three years, which the local fire agency may extend to five, and in the State Responsibility Area it is five years, which the Director may shorten but never below three. New construction complies from the effective date.

What the adopted rule requires for fences

One correction worth flagging: the Local Responsibility Area text and the State Responsibility Area text are not identical. The explicit ban on new parallel combustible fencing appears only in the LRA version. Full section-by-section breakdown: the Zone 0 fence rules, decoded. What counts as noncombustible (and why vinyl fails): the materials guide.

Where Zone 0 is already law

These six are highlights, not the list. The register carries all thirty-five jurisdictions we have verified from adopted text, plus the counties we checked and found nothing in, which is most of them: we read all fifty-eight county codes and the five-foot rule exists in local law almost nowhere outside the register. Deep dives: San Diego's real deadlines · every local ordinance in force. Note the City of Los Angeles is moving the other way: toward more lenient rules on vegetation, though not on fences.

Eight local codes may change meaning on filing day. Calaveras County (2017), Contra Costa County and two of its fire districts (2023), and Morro Bay (September 2025) each wrote the state's defensible space regulation, Title 14 Section 1299.03 and its neighbors, into their own codes by reference; Kensington Fire Protection District (July 2025) wrote in the statutes, the regulation and their future amendments at once, saying in its recitals that it intends Zone Zero alignment. Alpine County (2018, verified current August 2026), Mono County (2008), Inyo County (2020) and Tehama County point at the statutes instead: Mono and Inyo require property maintenance "in accordance with" Government Code 51182 and Public Resources Code 4291, and Tehama directs that rural and agricultural firebreaks be created and maintained the same way. Those are the two statutes the ember-resistant zone was later written into. Today none of these codes requires an ember-resistant zone, because the sections and statutes they point at do not require one yet. The day the state's Zone 0 text takes effect, the local law of all six may begin requiring it through their own municipal codes, with no new vote and no announcement, in Morro Bay's case on parcels the state rule's own trigger would never reach. Whether each incorporation is dynamic or frozen is a legal question the ordinances themselves do not answer. We flag it here because this page is where people will look on filing day, and nobody else is tracking these six.

What's already binding everywhere: the insurance rule

Separate from Zone 0, California's "Safer from Wildfires" regulation (10 CCR §2644.9) has required insurers that price for wildfire risk to credit noncombustible fences and gates within five feet of the home since October 2022. It binds insurers, not homeowners. But it is the first of twelve measures on the certification forms carriers use, and it is why documenting a fence upgrade matters regardless of when the state rule takes effect. How the fence credit works · how to document the work.

Frequently asked questions

Is Zone 0 the law in California right now?

No. The Board of Forestry approved the regulation on August 19, 2026 and filed it with the Office of Administrative Law on August 28, but that filing was withdrawn on September 8, 2026 before OAL decided anything. There is no effective date and no compliance clock, and the package is not currently under review. Zone 0 is enforceable today in at least thirty-five local jurisdictions, including: the Ventura County Fire Protection District, Laguna Beach, the Moraga-Orinda Fire District, Auburn, Berkeley's hillside zones, Montecito, and the City of San Diego.

When does it actually take effect?

No date is set, and after the September 8, 2026 withdrawal there is no filing pending that could set one. For the regulation to take effect the Board would have to file again, OAL would have to approve that filing, and it would then go to the Secretary of State. Board staff had expected an effective date as early as September 2026, which did not happen. Once effective, new construction complies immediately; existing homes get a phased runway, with fences in the last phase: three years in the Local Responsibility Area and five in the State Responsibility Area.

Will I have to tear out my wood fence?

No. The adopted rule does not require wholesale replacement. Existing fences may remain and may be repaired with like materials. The requirement lands on the five feet where a fence or gate attaches to (or comes within a foot of) the house, on new fences within five feet, and on full replacements in that zone. Myths vs. the actual rule.

How do I know if my home is covered?

All of the State Responsibility Area is covered, every hazard class; inside Local Responsibility Areas, only Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones. Check your address step by step.

Sources

• CAL FIRE Ready for Wildfire: Defensible Space (read August 20, 2026; says Zone 0 is "not legally required yet")
• Board of Forestry and Fire Protection: Notice of Proposed Emergency Action, Zone 0 Defensible Space (Notice Date August 20, 2026)
• Board of Forestry: Defensible Space Zones 0, 1 and 2
• July 2026 Draft Zone Zero Summary and Rule Text
• Executive Order N-18-25
• AB 3074 (2020)
• City of San Diego: Zone 0 Guidelines for Existing Structures
• Moraga-Orinda Fire District: Zone Zero
• City of Auburn: AMC §100.87(D)
• Berkeley Municipal Code Ch. 19.49
• CDI: Safer from Wildfires

This page describes proposed and adopted regulations as of its fact-check date and is not legal advice. Local jurisdictions may adopt alternative practices; confirm current requirements with your local fire agency.