Mandatory brush clearance in France: what the law actually requires around your house

Brush clearance is not a gardening recommendation. It is an obligation set out in the French Forestry Code, binding on the owner of any building in or near a wooded area classified as a fire risk. It is commonly called OLD, for obligations légales de débroussaillement — statutory clearance obligations.

The principle fits in one sentence: around a building, vegetation must be treated so that a fire coming out of the woodland finds nothing to carry it to the walls, and so that a fire starting at the house does not reach the woodland. The obligation protects in both directions, which is something many owners discover only on reading it.

The text was significantly tightened by the law of 10 July 2023 on wildfire prevention. Three things changed, and they are why the subject has suddenly resurfaced: informing the buyer became compulsory on a sale, enforcement and penalties were strengthened, and failure to comply can now be held against you when an insurer settles a fire claim.

The most common mistake is assuming the obligation targets "people who live in the woods". In the Rhône valley, a house on an estate whose back garden touches an untended plot is very often covered, and its owner has never known.

1. Is your land in a zone covered by the order?

All four departments in this area — Vaucluse, Drôme, Gard and Ardèche — are covered by a prefectural clearance order. What the order defines is the zones: classified woodland, and generally a two-hundred-metre band around it. If your plot falls inside that band you are covered, whether or not your garden looks anything like a forest.

2. Is there a building on the plot?

The obligation attaches to the building, not to the land. Bare land inside the zone generally creates no clearance obligation for its owner — it is the neighbour who built who must deal with the fifty metres, including where they run onto that bare land. We come back to this below, because it is the point that causes the most friction.

3. Are you the owner or the tenant?

The obligation falls on the owner of the building. A lease can put routine upkeep on the tenant, but as far as the authorities are concerned it is the owner who receives the formal notice and the owner who pays when the work is carried out on his behalf. A landlord relying on a tenant to clear the land is taking a risk he has not measured.

The reference radius is fifty metres around the building. The mayor can raise it to one hundred by order, and does so in the most exposed communes. Add ten metres either side of the private access track to the building — that second part is very widely forgotten, even though it is precisely the route the fire service will arrive by.

Fifty metres sounds abstract on paper. On the ground it means close to eight thousand square metres around the house. Since most private plots are smaller than that, the consequence is mechanical: the perimeter runs onto neighbouring land in almost every case.

When the 50 metres fall on your neighbour’s land

This is what causes the most neighbour disputes in the area, and the rule is counter-intuitive: the obligation remains that of the building’s owner. It is therefore for you to clear the part that lies on someone else’s land, at your own expense.

1. 1You inform the neighbouring owner of your obligation and ask permission to enter their land to carry it out.
2. 2If they agree, you do the work on their land, at your cost. You remove the cuttings.
3. 3If they refuse, the obligation — and its cost — transfer to them. The refusal must be put in writing and the mairie informed: a verbal refusal protects nobody.

In practice the conversation goes well nine times out of ten: the neighbour sees someone turn up to clear part of their land free of charge. It goes badly when the request arrives without explanation, on a Saturday morning, chainsaw already in hand. A written note a week ahead settles almost every case.

What an intervention covers, and how it is priced, is set out on the page about brush clearing.

This is the costliest misunderstanding on the subject, and it does damage in two opposite directions. Some owners do nothing because they believe they would have to fell their trees. Others strip the plot bare, lose the shade that made it liveable in July, and then find out it was never required.

Clearing means breaking the continuity of the fuel — horizontally along the ground, and vertically between the ground and the tree canopy. Fire spreads by contact; the point is to cut the bridges. In practice, four operations.

• Remove the low layer: scrub, bramble, dry grass, dead wood on the ground. That is what carries fire at ground level, and it is the bulkiest part of the job.
• Prune the trees you keep along their first few metres, so that ground flames cannot reach the low branches. This is the vertical bridge being removed, and it is the step most often forgotten.
• Space the crowns so they no longer touch, by thinning rather than felling. A fire that jumps from crown to crown cannot be stopped.
• Pull vegetation back from walls, openings and the roof, and remove branches overhanging the building. A branch above a roof is an ignition point directly over the roof timbers.

So the trees stay, and that is deliberate: bare ground erodes, heats up, and closes over within three years with the most flammable scrub there is. A properly cleared plot keeps its good specimens, spaced and lifted clear of the ground. It is also far more pleasant to live on.

Lifting low branches and thinning crowns is tree-surgery work: see tree pruning.

The area covered from Lapalud straddles four departments, and each has its own order. The fifty-metre principle does not move; the detail does. The table below does not replace reading the order in force — it says where to look.

Two practical differences come up repeatedly. The first is relief: on the right bank of the Rhône, in the Gard and Ardèche, the garrigue starts at the end of the garden and the ground falls away. Holm oak, Aleppo pine and juniper form a continuous cover there, and clearing is heavier for the same area. The second is the kind of plot: on the left bank, in the Vaucluse and Drôme plain, it is former farmland left untended that causes the problem, with bramble and reed.

The obligation is permanent: land must be compliant all year, not only on the day of an inspection. But there is a good and a bad season for the work, and it is not a matter of comfort.

The right window: autumn to late winter

From October to March the vegetation is dormant, cuttings dry more slowly, the risk of starting a fire during the work is low, and the ground carries machinery. It is also when lifting a tree’s low branches is best for the tree, the sap having gone down.

The season to avoid: March to late July

This is the nesting season. Destroying an occupied nest is illegal, and a hedge or thicket cut during nesting almost always contains one. This is not a matter of preference: destroying protected species and their nests carries criminal penalties. Spring work therefore has to be checked first, and sometimes postponed on part of the plot.

Summer: the work is restricted, sometimes suspended

During periods of high risk, using powered tools that can throw sparks — metal-blade brushcutters, discs, angle grinders — is restricted or banned by order, often on a daily colour-coded scale published by the prefecture. A professional working here checks that map the same morning. Burning cuttings is banned for much of the year and tightly regulated the rest of the time.

Clearing produces a considerable volume of vegetation, and leaving it on site amounts to having done nothing: a row of dry brash along the boundary is exactly the fuel the obligation set out to remove. Dealing with the cuttings is part of the job, and a real cost line.

• Chipping on site, spread in a thin layer. Cheapest and best for the soil, but it needs machine access and a controlled depth — a thick heap of chip is itself fuel.
• Removal to a tip or composting site: more expensive, because the volume is measured in trailer loads, but sometimes the only option on a slope or where there is no access.
• Burning: tightly regulated, banned for much of the year, and subject to declaration or authorisation depending on the commune. Never to be improvised.

On a quote this is the line that varies most. A thousand square metres reclaimed after three years of neglect produces several times the volume of land kept up annually — which is why the first job almost always costs markedly more than the ones that follow.

Enforcement sits with the mayor, who can have the breach recorded and serve formal notice. If nothing is done within the deadline, the work can be carried out on your behalf and billed to you — and work commissioned by the commune is never cheaper than work ordered in good time.

A financial penalty is added. Since the regime was strengthened, the administrative fine can be calculated per square metre left uncleared, which changes the scale entirely: over a perimeter of several thousand square metres the figure stops being symbolic. Criminal fines remain available in addition.

The point almost nobody has in mind: insurance

This is where the real financial risk sits. Since the 2023 law, failure to meet clearance obligations can be raised by the insurer when settling a fire claim, notably through an increased excess. Put plainly: on the day the house burns, the money saved on clearing can turn into a share of the loss left with you.

Put end to end, the arithmetic is simple. Bringing a plot into compliance costs hundreds of euros, the annual upkeep that follows a fraction of that, and an increased excess on a fire claim is counted in tens of thousands. No other item of garden maintenance has that ratio.

This is the 2023 change with the most concrete effects, and the one that makes the phone ring in the middle of the conveyancing season. When a property in a covered zone is sold, the buyer must be informed that the clearance obligation exists. The information sits in the survey pack handed over at sale, alongside the risk statement.

Two practical consequences. For the seller, a non-compliant plot becomes a visible, costed bargaining point, and usually one the buyer over-values: doing the work before listing almost always costs less than the discount conceded. For the buyer, the obligation bites from signature — you inherit the land and its backlog of neglect together.

Nobody can price clearance without seeing the land, and being wary of anyone who does it over the phone is a sound instinct. What can be said in advance is the unit it is counted in, and the items that make two quotes differ fourfold for the same area.

Clearance is priced per are or at a flat rate, never by the hour. Five items explain the gap between two plots of the same size.

• Starting density. Land kept up every year and land reclaimed after three are not the same job: the second produces several times the volume, and volume governs.
• Slope. Past a certain gradient no ride-on machine will work: everything is done on a handheld brushcutter and output halves.
• The kind of vegetation. Dry bramble chips quickly; green reed, kermes oak and juniper do not. Aleppo pine adds an upper layer that belongs to pruning.
• Access. A plot a trailer can reach and one reached down a footpath do not price the same, because everything cut has to come out.
• Dealing with the cuttings. Chipped on site, taken away, or both depending on the zone: the line that varies most.

The item-by-item breakdown of what a quote covers is on the brush clearing page.

None is beyond repair. All cost more to fix than to avoid.

1. 1Assuming it only applies to isolated houses in the woods. In the Rhône valley, an estate house whose back garden touches untended land is very often inside the perimeter.
2. 2Clearing only your own plot. The radius runs from the building, not from the boundary. If your fifty metres overrun, the part that overruns is your obligation.
3. 3Forgetting the ten metres along the access track. That is the route the emergency services will take; a blocked or overgrown track is a safety problem before it is a breach.
4. 4Stripping everything. The obligation is to break the continuity of the fuel, not to remove the trees. Bare ground closes over within three years with the most flammable scrub there is.
5. 5Forgetting the vertical layer. Immaculate ground beneath branches that come down to a metre does not meet the objective: the bridge between ground and crown is still there.
6. 6Working in high summer, with a disc or metal blade, on dry ground. That is the most direct way to start the fire you were protecting yourself from.

Flat ground, a modest area, kept up every year and with no upper layer is perfectly manageable yourself with a decent brushcutter and a morning. Plenty of owners here do exactly that, and it is entirely sensible.

Three situations change that: slope, which makes handheld work exhausting and the tool dangerous; reclaiming land after several years, where the volume of cuttings far exceeds what a private trailer can absorb; and trees to lift or thin, which is work at height rather than clearing.

In those three cases the honest calculation is not "what does it cost" but "how many weekends, with what hired kit, and for what result". Initial compliance done by a professional, followed by light annual upkeep done yourself, is often the cheapest combination over five years.