Every company scores your address. You cannot look up the number.

The score you cannot see

Nearly every company writing California homes runs a property-level wildfire model. Some buy it from an outside analytics firm, some build their own, and plenty blend the two. The model takes your address and returns a number, a letter, or a tier.

That result does a great deal of work inside the company. It can decide whether your application gets quoted at all, which program you land in, and what you are charged. It is the closest thing that exists to a single answer about your home, and you are not allowed to see it.

You can usually learn what it did, even if you cannot learn what it was. California's insurance privacy law lets you ask the company or your agent for the specific reasons behind a decision, in writing. Ask for them. The reasons are more useful to you than the score would ever be, because a reason points at something you can actually act on.

What these models generally weigh

The exact recipe is a trade secret at every company that has one. The ingredients are not much of a mystery, because they are the same conditions fire behavior research has pointed at for years.

Most of the list describes the land around you. A meaningful part of it describes your building.

• Distance to burnable land: how far the house sits from continuous brush, grass, or timber.
• Slope: fire climbs uphill and pushes heat and embers ahead of it, so a house above a slope scores worse than one on flat ground.
• How much plant growth is near the house, and what type, usually read from aerial or satellite photos rather than a visit.
• Road access: how wide the road is, whether there is more than one way out, and whether a fire engine can get in and turn around.
• Fire history: past fire perimeters near your address, and how often fire has run through that area.
• The house itself: roof material and fire rating, vents, eaves, siding, windows, and what is attached to or stored under the deck.
• Response: how far it is to a staffed fire station, and what water is available nearby.

Why two companies give two different answers

Nothing standardizes any of this. Two companies can license models from two different vendors, weigh the inputs differently, refresh their imagery on different schedules, and layer their own claims experience on top. Then each one applies its own cap on how much it is willing to write in your area, which has nothing to do with your house at all.

So the same application, sent out in the same week, comes back with genuinely different answers. That is not sloppiness, and it is not luck. It is several separate opinions about one address, which is what a market actually is.

It also means a score is not a fact about your home. It is one company's read of your home, on one day, through one model. Read it that way and the process stops feeling arbitrary and starts looking like something you can work with.

What you can change, and what you cannot

The building side of the model is largely yours, and so is the ground immediately around the house. The list at the end of this section is what that covers.

The rest is not. You cannot move the house off the slope, widen the county road, or shorten the drive from the nearest staffed station.

You cannot edit a fire perimeter from ten years ago. Those inputs are permanent, and no amount of work on the structure erases them. That is also why some homes do everything right and still land in the specialty market.

There is a third layer, and it is the one homeowners skip most often: proof. A model reading year-old aerial imagery cannot see the vents you replaced or the clearing you did after the last dry season. Work that nobody recorded gets priced as though it never happened. Photograph it, date the files, keep the invoices, and hand all of it over with the application.

• Roof material and fire rating.
• Ember-resistant vents and enclosed eaves.
• The siding on the lower walls, and clear gutters.
• Everything currently stored against a wall or under a deck.
• The ground immediately around the house, out to the distance your fire agency asks for.

Why the number of markets beats any single score

Here is the practical conclusion, and it is the reason this page exists. Since every company scores your home differently, the highest-value move is not chasing one score. It is getting more companies to look at your home.

One agent's answer is really just one set of insurers. If they cannot reach specialty insurers, then nothing was found where they looked, which is a very different sentence from nothing exists. More than 300,000 California homes are insured by specialty insurers now. That is up from about 50,000 in 2023, and a great many of those homeowners had already been told something close to no.

So treat a single turndown as one data point, not a conclusion. The real question is what the whole market says about your address, searched in one pass, with your documented safety work on record.