Oregon bill would require home insurers to consider wildfire prevention efforts
Published 2026/01/26 05:37:10
Oregon homeowners who take steps to protect their homes from wildfire could pay less for property insurance under a southern Oregon state senator’s proposal to require insurers to consider fire prevention efforts when setting rates.
Sen. jeff Golden, D-Ashland, modeled his new bill after a similar Colorado law. It follows years of rising property insurance premiums and policy cancellations or nonrenewals across the country, particularly in the wildfire-ridden West.
Growing wildfire risk and the costs of rebuilding have driven premiums up in Oregon by more than 27% since 2020, according to recent data from the Consumer Federation of America.
Under current state law, insurers must provide policy holders with information about whether and how they consider property-level wildfire prevention efforts, such as installing fire-resistant siding and roofing, in underwriting and rating decisions. But they’re not required to offer policy holders any incentives for those efforts.
The bill would require insurers who use catastrophic event and wildfire risk modeling formulas and scenarios to calculate what insurance premiums customers pay, to demonstrate that their models and formulas take policy holders’ wildfire prevention investments into account.
“Despite homeowners investment in home hardening and defensible space, and despite public investments in community-level mitigation, many, if not all, insurers are not taking these mitigation measures into account in the computer models they use to price and to decide whether to write or renew insurance, what’s called underwriting,” Dave Jones, former California insurance commissioner, told lawmakers at a Wednesday
