California Redrew the Fire Hazard Maps. Has Your City Adopted Them?

The switch that decides your code path

Before you design anything in a fire-prone part of California, one fact governs a surprising amount of the plan set: is the parcel in a Fire Hazard Severity Zone, and at what level? That answer decides whether the Wildland-Urban Interface code — Title 24, Part 7 — and the state's defensible-space rules apply at all. And the maps that hold that answer were just redrawn.

Here's the thing: the redraw doesn't change what the WUI code requires. It changes where the lines fall — which parcels are in, which are out, and which moved up a class. (For the "does the WUI code apply to me" mechanics — new buildings, additions, accessory structures — see our earlier breakdown: Does the WUI code apply to you?. This post is about the maps under it.)

The redraw came in two waves

CAL FIRE's Office of the State Fire Marshal rebuilt the zones on a new science-based model and rolled them out in two stages:

• State Responsibility Areas (SRA) — the new SRA zones took effect April 1, 2024.
• Local Responsibility Areas (LRA) — the recommended local maps were released to jurisdictions in four phases: February 10, February 24, March 10, and March 24, 2025.

The scale is real. Across local responsibility areas statewide, the 2025 recommendations tally roughly 1.16 million acres of Very High and 1.16 million acres of High Fire Hazard Severity Zone — about 2.3 million acres in the two most restrictive classes, on top of the SRA lands already adopted.

The maps don't self-execute

This is the part that trips people up. A recommended LRA map is not automatically the law in your city. State law puts a clock on it.

Verified against Government Code §51179 (leginfo): "A local agency shall designate, by ordinance, moderate, high, and very high fire hazard severity zones in its jurisdiction within 120 days of receiving recommendations from the State Fire Marshal …"

So every city and county has 120 days from receiving the recommendation to adopt the zones by ordinance. Two things follow that matter for your file:

• A city can make the map stricter but not weaker. The statute says a local agency "shall not decrease" a zone level and may only increase it — some jurisdictions add zones the state didn't map.
• There is no single dashboard showing who has finished. Adoption is rolling, city by city, and CAL FIRE itself directs the public to contact the local jurisdiction for LRA specifics.

Three answers, one parcel

That rolling adoption is where the edge cases live. On the same lot, right now, you could get three different answers depending on where you look:

• The current OSFM map may show a new or upgraded zone.
• The county GIS layer, or an old natural-hazard-disclosure report, may still show the previous designation.
• The city, mid-adoption, may not have an ordinance on the books yet.

For a plan checker in a newly mapped city, that gap isn't trivia — in LRA, only High and Very High trigger the state's WUI construction minimums (Class A roofing, WUI-listed vents, ignition-resistant cladding), so a zone that moved decides whether those requirements attach. For real-estate and escrow work, a Very High designation carries a statutory disclosure duty on transfer (Gov. Code §51183.5) and, once designated, the 100-foot defensible-space obligation under §51182. Verify the parcel against the current map; when a city is mid-adoption, call the building department and put the answer in the file.

One precision point: the 2025 WUI code names a specific incorporated SRA map "dated September 29, 2023." Don't read that date as the last word — the designation that governs your parcel is whatever the current OSFM map shows, especially in LRA where local adoption is still catching up.

How to check a parcel

Open the State Fire Marshal's Fire Hazard Severity Zones page, launch the FHSZ viewer, and enter the property address or APN. Confirm the level — Moderate, High, or Very High — because in local responsibility areas only High and Very High pull a project into the state WUI construction minimums. When the stakes are real, confirm the parcel's status in writing with the local jurisdiction: adoption status and any locally added zones live there, not on a statewide list.

What CrossBeam does with it

CrossBeam checks each project's parcel against the current Fire Hazard Severity Zone designation and tells you whether the WUI code and defensible-space rules are in play — before a plan checker does. When a city is still mid-adoption, it flags the uncertainty rather than guessing, so the answer in your file is one you can defend.