If you own a home in Colorado, a letter is coming that you’ve never received before — one that puts a number on how risky an insurance company thinks your property is when it comes to wildfire. Starting July 1, 2026, a new state law changes the rules on how carriers can use your Colorado wildfire risk score, and for the first time, it gives you the right to see your score, understand it, and fight back if it’s wrong.

At Premier Mountain Insurance, we’ve spent years helping Colorado homeowners who were denied, non-renewed, or priced out because of where they live. So we want to make sure you understand what’s changing, why it matters, and exactly what to do when that letter shows up.

First, Why This Law Exists

Colorado has become one of the hardest places in the country to insure a home. Since the Marshall Fire destroyed more than 1,000 homes in December 2021, carriers have responded by leaving the state, pausing new business in higher-risk areas, or raising premiums by amounts that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Homeowners in parts of Boulder County, El Paso County, and along the foothills and I-70 corridor have watched premiums climb 150% to 300%, and some now pay well over $8,000 a year — if they can find coverage at all.

For a long time, the frustrating part was that all of this happened behind a curtain. Carriers used secret “wildfire risk models” to score your property, and you had no way to see the score, no way to know what was driving it, and no clear way to argue that the mitigation work you’d already done should count for something.

House Bill 25-1182, signed into law on May 28, 2025, pulls back that curtain.

What Changes on July 1, 2026

Beginning July 1, 2026, any insurer that uses a wildfire risk model, a catastrophe model, or any scoring method to underwrite, price, non-renew, or surcharge your homeowners policy in Colorado must follow new transparency rules. Here’s what that means for you in plain English:

You get to see your score. Insurers that use a wildfire risk score must send you an annual written notice that includes your wildfire risk score, any other wildfire risk classification they used, and the mitigation discounts available to you.

Your mitigation work has to count. Carriers are now required to factor the actual mitigation you’ve done — defensible space, a fire-resistant roof, and similar improvements — into how they score and price your home. If a carrier doesn’t have a formal “mitigation model,” they’re still required to provide a discount when you can prove your property has been hardened.

You can appeal. Insurers must post on their website how their wildfire scoring works, the premium savings available for mitigation, and the process for appealing your wildfire risk score. If your score looks wrong, you now have a defined path to challenge it.

The short version: the score that’s been quietly driving your premium for years is finally something you can see and influence.

What to Do If Your Colorado Wildfire Risk Score Comes Back High

A high score isn’t a dead end — it’s a starting point. Here’s how we’d walk a client through it.

1. Read the notice carefully and ask for the details. Your score should arrive in writing. If anything about it is unclear, you (or we, on your behalf) can ask the carrier how it was calculated and what factors drove it.

2. Check it against reality. Risk models pull from aerial imagery, terrain, and regional data, and they get things wrong. If the model assumes vegetation you’ve already cleared or a roof you’ve already replaced, that’s exactly the kind of error the new appeal process exists to fix.

3. Do the mitigation that moves the needle. The improvements carriers reward most include:

  • Defensible space. Keep the first 30 feet around your home clear of dead vegetation, dry debris, and anything flammable up against the structure. From 30 to 100 feet, thin dense trees and remove “ladder fuels” that let fire climb into the canopy.
  • A Class 4, impact-resistant roof. Many carriers offer meaningful credits for fire- and impact-resistant roofing — which, as a bonus here in hail country, helps on the wind and hail side too.
  • Ember-resistant vents and hardened exterior details. Embers, not flames, destroy most homes in a wildfire. Closing off entry points matters.
  • Community-level mitigation. If your neighborhood pursues a Firewise USA certification, some carriers extend better approval rates and discounts to homes within it.

Mitigation isn’t free — a serious effort can run anywhere from a few thousand dollars into the tens of thousands depending on your lot — but it typically pays for itself in premium savings over a handful of years, and just as importantly, it can be the difference between being insurable and being uninsurable. Many Colorado towns and counties also offer cost-share grants that cover part of the work, so ask us before you assume you’re paying for all of it yourself.

4. Don’t go to the FAIR Plan first. If you’ve been non-renewed, the Colorado FAIR Plan exists as a last-resort safety net — but it pays actual cash value rather than replacement cost, caps coverage at $750,000 (a problem for higher-value homes), and covers a narrow set of perils. It’s a backstop, not a plan A. As an independent agency, our job is to exhaust the real options before anyone ends up there.

See what the state says about your address. The Colorado State Forest Service publishes a free Wildfire Risk Public Viewer that maps burn probability and potential fire intensity anywhere in Colorado, along with past fire perimeters and Community Wildfire Protection Plan boundaries. It is worth ten minutes before your next renewal. It is not the same thing as the wildfire risk score your carrier assigns you, and when the two disagree, that is a conversation to have with an agent rather than a surprise on a nonrenewal notice.

Where Premier Mountain Insurance Comes In

Here’s the honest part: this law gives you new rights, but it also gives you a new pile of paperwork, scores, and carrier-specific rules to untangle; and every carrier is going to handle it a little differently. That’s the whole reason an independent agency exists.

Because we work with many carriers rather than just one, we can compare how different companies score your specific property, point you toward the ones that reward the mitigation you’ve done, and help you build an appeal if your score doesn’t reflect reality. We’ve become a go-to in Colorado precisely for homeowners who were told “no” somewhere else.

If your renewal is coming up, if you’ve already gotten a non-renewal notice, or if you just want to understand your Colorado wildfire risk score before that letter lands this summer, reach out. We’re glad to walk through it with you.

Call us at 303.922.1002 or start a quote online. The sooner we look at your situation, the more options you’ll have.