Key Takeaways
- If you own a home in a Colorado wildfire-exposed area and aren’t sure whether your carrier will renew, call now. Carriers can non-renew before a fire starts, not just after, and the Colorado FAIR Plan is the backstop of last resort.
- The Aspen Acres fire is already surfacing uninsured homeowners; some residents in areas like Beulah and the Wet Mountains couldn’t obtain coverage at any price, which is exactly the coverage gap the Colorado FAIR Plan was created in 2023 to address.
- HB25-1182, which took effect July 1, gives Colorado homeowners the right to receive their wildfire risk score in writing and appeal it. The first renewal cycle under that law is happening right now, at the worst possible moment to discover a coverage problem.
- Even insured homeowners in the burn zone face out-of-pocket exposure: a 3% wildfire deductible on a $400,000 dwelling is $12,000 before coverage kicks in, and Colorado’s market commonly carries percentage-based deductibles in high-risk ZIP codes.
- Colorado’s average homeowner premium has already climbed to roughly $4,600 per year statewide, 58% above 2018 levels, and the 2026 wildfire season is putting rate pressure on every renewal cycle heading into fall.
What’s Burning and What It Means for Coverage
Six large wildfires are actively burning across Colorado today, July 4, 2026. The Aspen Acres fire in Pueblo and Custer counties has grown to more than 55,000 acres at 0% containment as of the morning of July 3, destroying at least 180 structures, including at least 55 homes, with FEMA authorizing federal funds to help with firefighting costs and the fire named the No. 1 priority in the nation. The Snyder fire on the western slope, the Gold Mountain fire near Ouray at more than 21,000 acres, and the Willow fire west of Leadville are burning simultaneously across a state already running on historically low snowpack and triple-digit temperatures.
For Colorado homeowners, this is not an abstract risk story. KDVR reported this week that at least one Beulah-area homeowner, Tara Stosek, had no insurance coverage at all, because carriers declined to write her area due to wildfire risk. Her home of 25 years was heavily damaged. She’s relying on a GoFundMe to start rebuilding. Carole Walker of the Rocky Mountain Insurance Association confirmed the dynamic plainly: some areas in Colorado are simply declining coverage because carriers can’t take on that risk and stay solvent. The Colorado FAIR Plan, established by HB23-1288 and signed into law in May 2023, is the backstop designed for exactly this situation, but Walker noted that even FAIR Plan coverage wasn’t affordable for Stosek’s family.
That’s the insurance story inside the wildfire story: not just that houses are burning, but that some of the people whose houses are burning have nowhere to file a claim.
What Colorado Homeowners in the Burn Zone Need to Do Right Now
If you’re in an evacuation zone or near any of the active fires, your first move is to locate your declarations page. Coverage A is your dwelling limit. The number that dictates your rebuild budget if the structure is a total loss. Coverage D is loss of use, which pays for temporary housing while you’re displaced. The daily limit on loss of use coverage varies by policy, and in a displacement that could last months, it matters. Most homeowners don’t check those limits until they need them.
For those outside the current burn areas but in Colorado wildfire-exposed ZIP codes: verify your coverage status before your next renewal lands. The Colorado Division of Insurance, which operates within the state’s Department of Regulatory Agencies (DORA), handles consumer complaints and can help homeowners who’ve received non-renewal notices navigate the Colorado FAIR Plan application process. The FAIR Plan provides property coverage of last resort for high-risk properties, but it covers fire, lightning, and limited perils, not liability, theft, or water damage. Homeowners who end up on the Colorado FAIR Plan typically need a separate Difference in Conditions (DIC) policy to cover the gaps. That combination is routinely more expensive than a standard admitted-market policy.
The wildfire deductible structure is the second thing to check. Colorado’s admitted carriers in high-risk areas frequently write percentage-based wind and wildfire deductibles, not flat-dollar deductibles. A 3% wildfire deductible on a $400,000 dwelling means $12,000 out of pocket before the carrier pays a cent. On a $600,000 home, that’s $18,000. Most homeowners in mountain and foothills ZIP codes don’t know their deductible structure until they’re filing a claim.
I spent nine years quoting policies at a midsize independent agency in the Midwest, including a period covering properties along wildfire-adjacent corridors. The conversation I had dozens of times was the same: the homeowner thought they were insured for the market value of the house, not the rebuild cost, and those numbers diverge sharply in Colorado’s market. The state’s average homeowner premium has reached roughly $4,600 per year statewide, up 58% since 2018, according to Colorado State University’s Regional Economic Development Institute. In mountain and foothills ZIP codes with wildfire exposure, $8,000 to $10,000 annual premiums are common. That’s what market-based pricing for actual risk looks like. The homeowner who finds the Colorado FAIR Plan unaffordable isn’t facing a rounding error. They’re facing a structural market failure that no law has fully resolved.
When a wildfire claim call comes in and the policyholder asks whether they’re covered, the agent already knows from the dec page. The conversation that follows is about how much and for how long, and sometimes it’s about breaking the news that loss of use coverage caps at 20% of the dwelling limit, which on a $400,000 policy is $80,000 for housing costs across what can easily be a 12-to-18-month rebuild. In a market where construction costs climbed 100.8% cumulatively in Colorado between 2020 and 2025, the highest of any state according to LendingTree’s analysis of Quadrant Information Services data, replacement cost calculations are more consequential than ever.
What the Insurance Market Looks Like Going Into This Event
State Farm has deployed CAT response teams to Colorado per a July 2 press release from the company’s newsroom, actively assisting policyholders affected by the Snyder, Gold Mountain, Ferris, Willow, and Aspen Acres fires. State Farm is the largest homeowners insurer in the country by market share and remains an active writer in Colorado, unlike its posture in California, where it stopped writing new homeowners policies in May 2023.
The Colorado Division of Insurance (DORA) does not have a California-style mandatory moratorium structure triggered by gubernatorial wildfire declarations. California’s CDI activates a 12-month non-renewal moratorium under Insurance Code Section 675.1 after a governor declares a state of emergency. Colorado has no equivalent statute. Non-renewals in Colorado can proceed in affected zip codes once a policy term expires. That is a meaningful gap in consumer protection that the current fire season is now stress-testing in real time.
HB25-1182, the wildfire risk score disclosure law covered in this space on July 1, took effect three days ago. It requires carriers that use wildfire catastrophe models or risk scoring to provide homeowners with their written risk score, the factors driving it, and an explanation of what mitigation steps could improve it. Colorado homeowners now have the right to appeal scores that don’t reflect completed mitigation work. That’s a legitimate new protection. But it doesn’t prevent a non-renewal. It doesn’t cap the premium. And it came into force at precisely the moment that six major wildfires are reminding the Colorado insurance market why carriers have been tightening underwriting there for years.
Carriers writing in Colorado, and the wildfire catastrophe models they use from providers including CoreLogic and Verisk, have been pricing elevated wildfire risk into Colorado homeowners filings for several years. The S&P Global Market Intelligence Q1 2026 data shows nine of the ten most financially significant homeowners rate increases filed nationally in the first quarter landed in Texas, but Colorado’s direction of travel is similar. Carriers’ rate filings in Colorado have been running at double-digit increases in wildfire-exposed ZIP codes. The Aspen Acres fire, burning across Pueblo and Custer counties, is adding real-world loss data that will flow into the next round of SERFF filings with the Colorado Division of Insurance. Carriers don’t just model prospective risk. They update their models after events.
If you’re holding a policy in a Colorado wildfire-exposed area, check your home insurance rates at your next renewal cycle rather than accepting the carrier’s number without shopping. The market has changed enough, and the Colorado FAIR Plan is now operational enough, that comparison shopping has real value, even in high-risk ZIP codes. And if you’ve completed defensible space, installed Class A roofing, or added ember-resistant vents, document it now. Under HB25-1182, that documentation is your appeal evidence if your risk score doesn’t reflect the work you’ve done.
