Wildfire risk and home insurance in Oregon: what buyers should actually check

Oregon spent the last eighteen months taking wildfire rules apart. Portland kept its own, and the map underneath them was drawn in 2002.

If you're buying here, that combination matters more than any of the individual changes. The state has stopped telling you things it used to tell you. The city still has a rule that applies to your roof.

What the state stopped doing

Three changes, in order.

SB 83, in 2025. Oregon repealed its statewide wildfire hazard map, made defensible space voluntary rather than required, and — the part that reaches a transaction directly — struck the wildland-urban interface question from the seller's property disclosure statement. That question used to be one of the few places a buyer was told in writing that a property carried a wildfire classification. It is gone.

May 2026. The Oregon State Fire Marshal finalized a statewide defensible space model code: a five-foot noncombustible zone next to structures, dead vegetation cleared, trees spaced, ladder fuels removed. Cities, counties and fire districts may adopt it. They are not required to. It was finalized on 19 May 2026.

June 2026. SB 1551 took effect on 5 June 2026. It makes it unlawful for an HOA or a deed covenant to prohibit replacing non-fire-hardened materials or installing fire-hardened ones. If you want a metal roof and your HOA's rules said no, those rules no longer hold on that point.

Read together: hardening your house got easier, and finding out whether you should got harder.

What Portland still does

Portland has its own Wildfire Hazard Zone, in Chapter 24.51 of city code. It did not go away with the state map.

The zone is defined by a Wildfire Hazard Zone Map that the code adopts by reference — dated 11 October 2002. Properties land in it based on a cumulative hazard score built from topography, vegetation and fuel distribution.

And it carries a real construction requirement: fire-resistant roofing is required on a structure in a fire hazard area. That is not a recommendation.

So a buyer in Portland can now be under contract on a house that sits inside a city hazard zone, inherits a roofing requirement because of it, and is told nothing about any of it on the disclosure form.

How to actually check an address

The city does not publish a list of neighborhoods in the zone, and we are not going to guess at one. The designation is parcel by parcel.

Look the address up on PortlandMaps. That is the city's own instruction and it is the only reliable answer. Do it during your inspection window, not after.

Then three follow-ups worth making before you remove contingencies:

Ask what the roof is. If the property is in the zone, the roofing requirement is live the next time that roof is replaced, and that is a real number on a house you are about to own.

Ask your insurance agent for a quote in writing, early. Wildfire exposure is priced by carriers on their own models, not on the city map, and the time to find out a carrier won't write the property is while you still have a way out.

Ask whether the seller has done any hardening. Since June, an HOA can't block it — which means it's now a reasonable thing to ask about and a reasonable thing to plan.

Where this fits

Wildfire sits alongside the other things about a Portland house that don't show up in the listing photos and do show up in the cost of owning it. Our guide to sewer scope inspections covers the one under the yard, and seismic retrofit requirements in Portland covers the other hazard the city has an opinion about.

Primary sources, both worth ten minutes: Portland City Code Chapter 24.51 and PortlandMaps.

Read next: Portland sewer scope inspections · Seismic retrofit requirements in Portland · Buy a home with Grand Union

Looking at a house and not sure what the hazard designation means for it? Start a conversation.