About the Rating

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What does your Rating mean?

The purpose of the Bushfire Resilience Rating system is to help you know which actions will measurably improve the resilience of your home. Every home is different, and every location has different risks.

Homes up to 1km away from bushland are included in the Bushfire Resilience Rating self-assessment. The risk of home ignition reduces the greater the distance to the edge of bushland, however fire can spread to your home at this distance via windborne embers, structure-to-structure fires, ground fires and spot fires.

The Rating system assesses the ability of a home to defend itself, called ‘passive protection’, and assumes people have evacuated and aren’t present to put out spot fires or manually activate safety systems.

The higher your Rating, the higher the probability your home will survive the type of bushfire event likely at your location. The lower your Rating, the lower the probability your home will survive a bushfire event. The higher the environmental risk, the stronger and more resistant the home will need to be to survive a bushfire event.

Lowest resistance Highest resistance
Majority of older homes Majority bushfire minimum standard homes Best-practice bushfire resilient homes
Lowest resistance
Majority of older homes Majority bushfire minimum standard homes Best-practice bushfire resilient homes
Highest resistance

How is your Rating calculated?

The Bushfire Resilience Rating measures how well your home would perform in a bushfire event and is calculated using a combination of the local environmental risk and the bushfire resistance of your home.

Building performance

The design and materials of your home influence how well your home can withstand a bushfire event. The home may be threatened directly from the bushfire, and from nearby items that have ignited. The Bushfire Resilience Rating measures how well a home can defend itself, assuming that people have evacuated.

Environmental risk

The Bushfire Resilience Rating utilises risk mapping of the bushfire intensity likely at your location, combined with information you provide in the home assessment app to consider the potential levels of radiant heat, ember attack and fire spread to your home via nearby structures, stored items, landscaping and vegetation.

Resilience Rating

The Bushfire Resilience Rating measures residual risk (probability of building loss), which is the risk that remains after considering the resilience of your home to local bushfire risk. It is common to start with a low Rating, but there are often many low-cost actions that can improve your home’s resilience.

Want to get technical?

If you’re a science enthusiast, download the research paper to learn more about the Rating calculation.

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"RBC’s Resilience Rating system is an amazing step forward in empowering Australians to have safer homes. The Ratings are also an opportunity for insurers to recognise home resilience works completed by homeowners in insurance pricing. This would ensure households retain affordable insurance into the future, in line with the reduced risk."

Sharanjit Paddam, Principal - Climate Analytics at Finity Consulting.

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Resilience Ratings program

Meet the experts translating decades of science and research into practical tools to help Australian communities increase their resilience.

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