Idaho’s ‘Home Hardening’ Initiative Aims to Secure Insurance
As insurance carriers debate the risks of insuring homes in wildfire-prone areas, the Idaho Department of Insurance is promoting a solution: ‘home hardening.’ This initiative encourages homeowners to make their properties more fire-resistant to maintain insurance coverage.
In 2023, Idaho had about 91 insurance carriers operating in the state. By April 2025, between 22 and 25 of these carriers had left, partly due to wildfire concerns. This exodus left some homeowners without property insurance, prompting the Idaho Department of Insurance to seek solutions.
“We started seeing in our own marketplace some carriers being more cautious about who they would insure and how they would insure them,” said Dean Cameron, director of the Idaho Department of Insurance. Unlike 26 other states with the Fair Plan Act, which guarantees home insurance even if multiple agencies decline coverage, Idaho doesn’t have such legislation. Cameron argues that this isn’t necessarily negative, as Fair Plans can lead to carriers paying assessments for risks beyond their control.
The Idaho Department of Insurance is exploring alternative strategies to ensure homeowners can obtain property insurance, even in wildfire-prone areas. One key solution is helping homeowners ‘harden’ their homes against fires. This involves tasks like cleaning gutters, replacing wooden fences with metal ones, and creating defensive, green spaces around homes as fire buffers.
“Insurance companies rate based on the risks they see,” Cameron explained. “If you can show you’re less risky, that reflects in how they rate you.” Two Idaho firefighters have implemented this concept through a program called Ember Safe. They conduct home inspections and provide homeowners with steps to create a ‘hardened’ area around their properties.
“We work with homeowners hand-in-hand, doing home inspections and providing them with the steps to create a home hardened area,” said Zach Mason, co-founder of Ember Safe. After inspecting and hardening a home, they issue a certificate that homeowners can present to their insurance company as proof of their home’s fire-resistant status. “Some homeowners have gone back to full coverage because of it,” Mason noted.
While hardening a home doesn’t guarantee full coverage, it certainly helps, according to Cameron. The Department of Insurance is also pursuing legislation that would offer grants to homeowners to harden their properties. “We encourage folks to do those kinds of things so they can make the argument that they’re a reasonable risk to take on,” Cameron said.
The Department is currently gathering data on how many homeowners have lost their insurance coverage. Cameron emphasized that the Department is available to help Idahoans navigate the challenges of maintaining or obtaining property insurance and encouraged those in need to contact them for assistance.
