California's Zone 0 Rule: What the First Five Feet Actually Requires

If you own a house in a California State Responsibility Area, or in a Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone inside a city, the strip of ground within five feet of your walls is about to have rules attached to it. The final draft of those rules cleared its last board vote on August 19, 2026.

Most of what you will hear about it lands in one of two camps: rip out your entire garden, or nothing has really changed. Neither is right, and the difference matters because some of what the rule asks for is due within three years and some of it is due on day one.

You can work out most of your own obligations this afternoon with a tape measure. Here is what the approved text says.

Where the rule stands right now

The California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection approved the final draft of the Zone 0 regulations on August 19, 2026. It is not law yet. As KRCR reported, the package still has to clear the Office of Administrative Law, with a five-day public comment period, and then be approved and published by the Secretary of State.

So there is no statewide effective date on the calendar yet. Everything below is timed off that effective date once it lands, not off the August vote.

The rule did not appear out of nowhere. The Board's own August 2026 rule summary traces it to Assembly Bill 3074 in 2020, then Senate Bill 504 in 2024, Assembly Bill 1455 in 2025, and Governor Newsom's Executive Order N-18-25 after the January 2025 Los Angeles fires. It covers property in State Responsibility Areas and in Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones within Local Responsibility Areas.

You can still have plants in Zone 0

This is the part that gets mangled in summaries. The rule does not require five feet of bare gravel around your house.

Zone 0 is split into two areas. There is a non-combustible "safety zone" pressed right up against the building and under the eaves, and beyond it a low-combustibility zone that runs out to the five-foot line. Plants are allowed in that outer part.

The Board's summary lists what qualifies: non-woody smaller plants in spaced groupings, naming bulbs, impatiens, begonias, petunias, poppies, yarrow and non-thatching succulents. Low ground covers count too, with blue-star creeper, beach strawberry, creeping thyme and mosses given as examples.

Lawn is allowed if you keep it mowed to three inches. Potted plants are allowed if the pot is non-combustible, easily moveable, and the whole thing stands no taller than 1.5 feet, with spacing maintained.

What is banned outright, anywhere in Zone 0, is the combustible stuff that is not alive: bark mulch and other combustible mulches, wood chips, fallen leaves and needles, firewood and stored wood. The same prohibition covers your roof and your gutters.

Measure your eaves, because that number is your buffer

The vegetation-free strip is not a fixed width. It flexes with your roof overhang, which is the single most useful thing to know before you start pulling plants out.

The rule sets the safety zone at the width of the eave, measured out to the drip line. The Board's summary gives the arithmetic plainly: a structure with 12-inch eaves gets a 12-inch safety zone, and a structure with 36-inch eaves gets one 36 inches wide.

Where eaves are shallow, the safety zone still has to be at least one foot. Three extra buffers apply regardless: two feet clear of windows, doors and vents, and five feet clear of attached decks and similar features.

So the practical first move is to stand at a wall, measure from the siding out to where the roof edge sits above you, and write that number down. That is the strip that has to end up with nothing growing in it.

Trees, fences and sheds

Existing trees can stay in Zone 0. They come with maintenance conditions: dead wood removed immediately, branches kept ten feet from chimneys and clear of eaves per existing statute, and branches trimmed to five feet above the roof.

Ladder fuels, the low limbs that carry fire from the ground up into a canopy, have to go. The rule sets that at the bottom six feet for large trees, or the lower third for smaller ones, whichever is less. Local defensible space inspectors judge the risk tree by tree.

You cannot plant new trees in Zone 0 once the regulation takes effect, which the Board ties to alignment with the California Wildland Urban Interface code.

Fences get a specific fix rather than a demolition order. Where a fence attaches to the house, a five-foot non-combustible section is required, and the Board's example is swapping a wooden gate for a metal one. No new combustible fences or gates go in Zone 0, though repairs to existing ones are fine.

Sheds and outbuildings that sit inside Zone 0 need non-combustible exterior roofs and walls.

What is due when

New construction has to comply the moment the regulation is adopted, with no phase-in.

For an existing home, a handful of items take effect immediately, because they already track state law and the Wildland Urban Interface code: combustible debris off roofs and out of rain gutters, dead tree branches removed, and branches cleared from within ten feet of chimneys.

Phase 1 runs for the first three years. That covers clearing combustible items like firewood, mulch and wood chips out of the five feet, removing dead and dying plants, trimming trees to the standard above, and reworking your planting to the allowable list.

Phase 2 goes out to five years from the effective date, with your local jurisdiction setting the exact deadline inside that window. It covers the under-eave safety zone for non-tree vegetation, replacing combustible gates, and adjusting sheds and fencing.

There is real local flexibility built in. In Local Responsibility Areas, fire agencies can authorize alternative practices based on geography, lot size, structure composition or code compliance, so long as they find the alternative equally effective and the city council or board of supervisors approves it.

Why the first five feet and not the first fifty

The Board's reasoning is that this is where wind-blown embers land and where homes are most likely to ignite, and the insurance research points the same way.

The Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety published findings in August 2025 that creating an ember-resistant buffer around a home cuts its risk of igniting from a wildfire in half. An earlier 2021 study IBHS ran with ZestyAI found that clearing vegetation from the perimeter can nearly double a structure's likelihood of surviving.

Steve Hawks, IBHS senior director for wildfire, framed the fix as smaller than people expect: "Something as simple as moving these at least five feet away could be the game-changer for your home surviving a wildfire."

The post-fire field notes on the Wildfire Prepared Home research page are worth reading for how ordinary the ignition points are. One home is documented as likely lost to an ember that landed on a combustible front door mat. Elsewhere, fire ran through wood mulch and stopped dead where the landscaping switched to rock.

A five-minute walk-around you can do today

Start at one corner and go around the building. Measure the eave overhang at a couple of points and treat the widest as your working number, since that strip needs to end up vegetation-free.

Then look for the things that are not landscaping at all. Bark mulch in the beds, the firewood stack leaning on the siding, plastic bins, a doormat, anything stored under a deck or a set of stairs.

Check the gutters and the roof line for needle and leaf litter, since that one is on the immediate list rather than the three-year list. Then walk to wherever a fence or gate touches the house and note the material of the last five feet.

If you would rather have that walk-around scored than kept in your head, our Wildfire Defensible Space Scorer turns the same checklist into a number and a ranked action list. It weights the two Zone 0 items at 12 and 5 points out of 100, and its CAL FIRE flag only turns green when both are checked. Treat it as fast triage across all three zones rather than a line-by-line audit of the new rule text, since the rule goes finer than any single checkbox can.