One Canberra address in 17 sits where a bushfire has burned since 2000. In three of its newest suburbs, it is every one.

The Bureau of Meteorology declared an El Niño in June 2026, and the national fire outlook for spring has raised bushfire risk in parts of seven states and territories. A recorded fire is not a forecast, but it is the one thing about bushfire that can be checked address by address: has this ground burned before?

We checked every address in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia and the ACT against the outline of every bushfire recorded since 2000. 155,745 addresses, 1.1%, sit inside one. Most are on the edges of cities and in country towns, and the share is highest in the ACT, where one address in 17 sits inside the outline of a fire.

	Addresses	Since 2000	Share	Since 2016	2019-20 season	Burned in two or more years
ACT	246,121	14,878	6.0%	440	7	3,233
Greater Perth	1,164,718	28,250	2.4%	1,803	815	3,224
Regional Western Australia	371,661	7,498	2.0%	2,353	267	570
Regional New South Wales	1,838,676	32,011	1.7%	15,937	11,447	2,098
Regional South Australia	341,205	4,796	1.4%	1,147	787	345
Regional Victoria	1,077,154	13,191	1.2%	3,525	2,887	465
Greater Melbourne	2,890,843	20,625	0.7%	1,197	4	347
Regional Queensland	1,703,711	12,021	0.7%	4,272	1,075	2,338
Greater Sydney	2,809,240	14,608	0.5%	2,210	1,197	1,092
Greater Brisbane	1,413,075	6,028	0.4%	541	346	937
Greater Adelaide	790,375	1,839	0.2%	1,050	978	15
All six	14,646,779	155,745	1.1%	34,475	19,810	14,664

An outline is the outer edge of a fire, as the fire agencies mapped it. Being inside one does not mean a house burned. Fires leave gaps, crews save streets, and some outlines are drawn around a whole town that the fire burned around. What it does mean is that the land was inside the fire.

Canberra built its newest suburbs on the 2003 fire ground

On 18 January 2003, fires from the Brindabella Ranges reached Canberra's western edge. Much of the land they burned west of the city was pine plantation, and it has since become the Molonglo Valley district. Every address in Denman Prospect, Wright and Coombs, and 95% of Whitlam's, sits inside the 2003 outline, in suburbs built more than a decade later.

Suburb	Addresses	Inside a fire outline since 2000
Denman Prospect	4,491	100%
Coombs	2,917	100%
Wright	2,346	100%
Whitlam	1,721	95%
Strathnairn	1,134	38%
Duffy	1,406	29%
Chapman	1,167	21%

The older suburbs on the list, Duffy and Chapman, are where the 2003 fires reached homes that were already standing.

Growth estates on land that burned before the houses

The same pattern shows on the fringes of Perth and Brisbane, where estates have been built on bushland that burned in the 2000s. In Alkimos and Eglinton, on Perth's northern coast, two thirds of addresses sit inside a fire outline since 2000, and about one in six inside fires from two or more different years. In Yarrabilba, south of Brisbane, 41% sit inside fires that burned the Wickham Timber Reserve in 2008 and Plunkett Regional Park in 2012, before the estate was built.

Suburb	Addresses	Inside a fire outline since 2000	Two or more years
Alkimos, Perth	7,589	68%	18%
Eglinton, Perth	5,098	66%	17%
Yarrabilba, Brisbane	6,881	41%	9%
Yanchep, Perth	7,334	19%	6%

A fire before the houses were built is part of the history of the land and the bush around it, not of the houses on it now, which were built to the bushfire standards of their day.

The 2019-20 season

In the six states and territories we checked, 19,810 addresses sit inside a fire from the 2019-20 season, most of them in regional New South Wales. The highest shares are in the towns Black Summer reached in the south-east: 38% of Tabulam's addresses, 29% of Mallacoota's, 26% of Batlow's and 17% of Lobethal's, in the Adelaide Hills. The season also includes fires elsewhere, such as at Yanchep in Western Australia.

What this means if you are buying

• Look up the bushfire-prone map. Each state publishes one, and it decides the construction standard (the BAL rating) for a new home or an extension. That map, not fire history, is what applies to building.
• Ask about the BAL of the house itself. A home built under the current standards had to meet the rating its site was given when it was approved, so the rating on its paperwork matters more than when the land last burned.
• Get an insurance quote early. Premiums reflect the insurer's own view of bushfire risk, and it can differ from street to street.

A fire outline is history, not a prediction. A suburb with no recorded fire is not necessarily safe, and one with an old fire is not necessarily at risk.

How we counted

• Fire outlines are Geoscience Australia's national historical bushfire boundaries, with Western Australia's 2024 to 2026 fires from the WA Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions. Planned hazard-reduction burns are left out. Records whose type is not stated are counted, as they are on SuburbScan's property pages.
• A fire's year is its ignition date, or the date it was mapped when no ignition date is recorded. Several agencies record a default day, such as 1 January, so we use years only. The 2019-20 season is 1 July 2019 to 31 March 2020.
• "Two or more years" means fires from at least two different years. Counting fire records instead would double-count a fire that two agencies both mapped.
• Addresses are G-NAF address points; each unit in a block counts. Tasmania and the Northern Territory are not included. "Greater" cities are the ABS Greater Capital City Statistical Areas.
• The share for a suburb is its addresses inside an outline, divided by all its addresses. Suburbs in the tables have at least 500.

Every property page on SuburbScan lists the recorded bushfires near the address.