Creating defensible space around your home in Washington and Oregon

What the law says in 2026

Oregon. Senate Bill 762 (2021) set up a statewide wildfire hazard map and tied a mandatory defensible-space code and a home-hardening building code to the properties it rated highest. That structure is gone. Senate Bill 83, enacted as Oregon Laws 2025, chapter 590, was approved by the Governor on July 24, 2025 with an emergency clause, so it took effect that day [1][2]. It repeals ORS 455.612 (the home-hardening code), ORS 476.390 and 476.394 (the mandatory defensible-space provisions) and ORS 477.490 (the hazard map), amends ORS 476.392, and states in section 8 that any State Forestry Department order assigning a property to a wildfire hazard zone is “null and void” [2].

What replaces it is a model code. SB 83 directs the State Fire Marshal to create and make available a model defensible-space code built on the 2024 International Wildland-Urban Interface Code, and says in the same breath that the Fire Marshal “may not require a local government to adopt the model code” [2]. Under OAR 837-040-0030 a city, county or fire district that chooses to adopt it must notify OSFM [3]. So the question for an Oregon homeowner is no longer “what zone am I in” but “has my city or fire district adopted the model code,” and the answer in most places on Oct 2, 2026 is no.

Washington. The DNR pages read for this guide describe defensible space as something homeowners do, not something the state orders: the program is Wildfire Ready Neighbors, run through regional coordinators covering counties from Clark and Thurston to Spokane and Okanogan, with free guides and a home-preparedness video [4][5]. DNR’s own number for why it matters: studies suggest as many as 80 percent of homes lost to wildland fire might have survived if brush had been cleared and defensible space created [5]. Local fire codes and homeowners’ associations can still impose vegetation rules; this page covers the state-level picture.

Where and when the risk is highest

With the Oregon map repealed, two federal datasets still give a county-level picture. FEMA’s National Risk Index (December 2025 release) rates wildfire risk “relatively high” in five Oregon counties, Deschutes, Douglas, Jackson, Josephine and Wasco, and five Washington counties, Chelan, Kittitas, Klickitat, Okanogan and Yakima; no county in either state is rated “very high,” and the Portland and Seattle cores, Multnomah and King counties, rate “relatively low” [17]. A low county rating does not make a house at the edge of a forest safe; it is a rough guide to where the work pays off most.

NOAA’s Storm Events Database shows when. It holds 742 Wildfire reports for Oregon and 542 for Washington since the category began in 1996 [18]. In the 2016–2026 records, 518 reports, about 77 percent began in July, August or September and 94 percent between June and October, and 2020 had the most (87) [18]. These are report counts, not fire counts. The practical reading: schedule limbing, thinning and chipping for October through May, outside the months when most fires start.

Insurance is the other reason to do it now. The Insurance Information Institute’s national homebuyer handbook (2023) notes that wildfires can occur in at least 38 states, and that in fire-prone areas, fire-resistant materials and defensible space can widen a homeowner’s insurance options; it suggests asking your insurance professional whether such precautions lower the premium [19]. Ask yours; Oregon’s Division of Financial Regulation and Washington’s Insurance Commissioner remain the authorities on what a policy must cover.

The three zones

Oregon’s State Fire Marshal and the OSU Extension fire-resistant plant guide used across the Pacific Northwest (PNW 590, revised October 2023) describe the same three rings around the house, out to 100 ft, or 200 ft on steep slopes [3][6].

Two distances matter more than the rest. PNW 590 asks for a minimum of 15 ft between any tree branch and the house, and 10 ft or more between groups of plantings [6]. OSFM asks for 10 ft between tree crowns and 6 ft of clear trunk under them [3]. For a fire engine to reach you at all, OSFM wants 13 ft 6 in of vertical clearance and 20 ft of horizontal clearance on the driveway [3]; overhanging Douglas fir and bigleaf maple limbs are usually what closes that gap.

Which trees to limb, which to remove

Start at the walls and work outward. PNW 590 is blunt about conifers: most evergreens have fire-prone characteristics, most contain resins that make them unsuitable close to a house, spreading and upright juniper is singled out as highly flammable, and arborvitae holds a lot of dry dead material in its interior [6]. In practice that means the Leyland cypress or Emerald Green arborvitae hedge planted along the foundation is the first thing to go in the 0 to 5 ft zone, before any large tree is touched. See arborvitae and hedge trimming for the reduce-versus-remove decision.

From 5 to 30 ft, the question for each conifer is whether it can meet all three numbers: branches 15 ft off the house, crown 10 ft from the next crown, trunk clear to 6 ft (PNW 590 says 6 to 10 ft for conifers) [3][6]. A 40 ft Douglas fir 12 ft from the eaves can usually be limbed and thinned to comply; a 90 ft one with its crown over the roof cannot be pruned into compliance and becomes a removal decision, often a crane job on a tight lot. Deciduous trees with high leaf moisture, the bigleaf maples and oaks, are the ones PNW 590 treats as fire-resistant choices, so thin and limb them rather than cutting them [6].

Ladder fuels

PNW 590 defines ladder fuels as flammable material that lets fire climb from the ground into a tree’s canopy: tall grass, shrubs and small trees growing under larger trees, plus the low branches of the big trees themselves [6]. The fix is mechanical and cheap compared with removal: mow or pull the understory, cut out the suppressed saplings, and prune the lowest limbs of conifers 6 to 10 ft up [3][6]. On the west side the usual ladder is salal, sword fern duff and volunteer hemlock under second-growth Douglas fir; on the east side it is bitterbrush and bunchgrass under ponderosa pine. Either way the goal is the same: a fire that reaches the base of a tree should find nothing to climb.

Limbing is where homeowners get hurt. Anything above shoulder height, anything that needs a ladder with a running saw, and anything within 10 ft of a power line is crew work; the line distance is a legal minimum for non-qualified workers in both states, not a suggestion (OAR 437-002-0306 in Oregon, WAC 296-24-960 in Washington) [10][11]. See tree trimming and work near power lines.

What to do with the debris

Defensible-space work produces piles, and the pile is where people break the law. In Oregon, a burning permit is required on ODF-protected land during fire season, and an open fire inside or within 1/8 mile of a forest protection district needs a written permit unless the forester waives it outside fire season (ORS 477.515) [12]. Inside the Portland metro boundaries drawn in OAR 340-264-0120 to -0140, backyard burning is prohibited all year [13]. In Washington, WAC 173-425-040 bars residential and land-clearing burning in every urban growth area and every city over 10,000 people [14], and DNR requires a written permit for any fire within 50 ft of a structure or 500 ft of forest slash on land it protects [15]. The practical answer in both states is chipping on site, with chips spread outside the 5 ft zone, or hauling to a yard-debris facility. The agency-by-agency rules are in Oregon yard debris burning rules and Washington yard debris burning rules; the chip-and-haul end of the job is covered under brush clearing.

Cost by crew-hour

There are no public price lists for this work, so the figures below are built from our cost model: a 3-person crew with a chipper and truck, priced at the BLS mean wage for tree trimmers and pruners ($35.40 in Oregon, $32.20 in Washington, May 2025) times a payroll and overhead multiplier, which rounds to $225 per crew-hour in Oregon and $210 in Washington [16]. Modeled estimate, not quotes (method).

Modeled estimate, not quotes. A crane day adds $1,500 to $3,500, backyard carry-out adds 30 percent, and stump grinding runs $150 to $450 by diameter in the same model. The full tables are on tree removal cost and tree trimming cost; larger parcels are priced as land clearing.

Programs and where to start

• Washington: Wildfire Ready Neighbors (DNR) lists a regional coordinator for your county and links the “Defend Your Home from Wildfire” guide and fire-resistant plant lists for western and eastern Washington [4][5].
• Oregon: the State Fire Marshal defensible space page has the zone checklist above and the model code for local adoption [3]; ODF’s district offices issue the burn permits [12].
• Both: PNW 590 is the plant-by-plant list for what to put back once the junipers are gone [6].