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 file 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 permitted 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 the agent for the specific reasons behind a decision, in writing. Ask for them. The reasons are more useful to you than the score would be, because reasons point at something you can 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.

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  Distance to open fuel: how far the house sits from continuous brush, grass, or timber.

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  Slope and terrain: fire climbs uphill and pushes heat and embers ahead of itself, so a house above a slope reads worse than the same house on flat ground.

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  Vegetation density and type near the structure, usually read from aerial or satellite imagery rather than from a visit.

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  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.

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  Fire history: past fire perimeters near your address, and how often fire has run through that area.

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  The house itself: roof material and fire rating, vents, eaves, siding, windows, and what is attached to or stored under the deck.

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  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 file, 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 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. Roof material and fire rating, ember-resistant vents, enclosed eaves, the siding on the lower walls, clear gutters, and everything currently stored against a wall or under a deck. The ground immediately around the house is yours too, out to the distances your fire agency asks for.

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.

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 one set of markets. If they cannot reach the specialty surplus lines market, then nothing was found where they looked, which is a very different sentence from nothing exists. More than 300,000 California homes are insured in that market now, 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 rather than a conclusion. The question worth answering is what the whole market says about your address, searched in one pass, with your documented mitigation in the file.

Common questions