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How to check bushfire-prone areas and fire hotspots for a site in Victoria

By Mazdak Ghasemi · Last checked 14 October 2026

Before buying, building on or assessing a site in Victoria, three bushfire questions come up again and again. Is the land in a designated bushfire prone area? Is it under the Bushfire Management Overlay? And what fire activity has there been around it, recently and in the past? Each question has a different official source, and this guide shows where to find each answer and what it does and does not tell you.

This guide is for planning and research, not for emergencies. For current fires and warnings, use VicEmergency. In an emergency, call Triple Zero (000).

Bushfire prone areas

The Victorian Government describes bushfire prone areas (BPA) as places where the bushfire hazard has been identified and mapped under the building system: areas that are subject to, or likely to be subject to, bushfires. Being in one changes what you have to build.

What it means for a building

Inside a designated bushfire prone area, a minimum construction standard applies to new residential buildings, schools, child care centres, hospitals, aged care facilities and buildings for other sensitive land uses. The standard is measured as a bushfire attack level (BAL), which rates how exposed a building may be to ember attack, radiant heat and direct flame contact. The map's own description sets the minimum at BAL-12.5.

The Australian Standard for building in bushfire prone areas, AS 3959, has six levels, from lowest to highest exposure: BAL-LOW, BAL-12.5, BAL-19, BAL-29, BAL-40 and BAL-FZ (Flame Zone).

The level for a specific site comes from a BAL assessment by a suitably qualified person. Fire Protection Association Australia trains and accredits assessors and may be able to provide a list.

Three details that often matter:

  • Partly inside the area. If no part of the building footprint falls inside the bushfire prone area, the requirements do not apply. If any part does, the whole building must meet them.
  • Sheds. A shed that is not attached to the dwelling, or is more than six metres from it, does not need to meet the standard (AS 3959:2018, clause 3.2.3).
  • Selling land. Under section 32C of the Sale of Land Act 1962, the vendor statement must say whether the land is in a designated bushfire prone area.

How to check

  • For one address: search the address in VicPlan or request a planning property report. The report states whether the property is in a designated bushfire prone area, alongside its zones and overlays, and can be downloaded as a PDF.
  • For many sites or a whole region: download the Designated Bushfire Prone Area dataset from the Victorian Government Data Directory. It is maintained by the Department of Transport and Planning, published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence, and also offered as a web map service you can add to QGIS or ArcGIS. The map is reviewed periodically; the most recent review listed on the dataset page was gazetted on 16 June 2026.

The Bushfire Management Overlay

The Bushfire Management Overlay (BMO) is a planning control, not a building one. It applies to bushfire prone areas with very high and extreme bushfire hazard and triggers planning permit requirements, including mandatory bushfire protection measures such as defendable space, water supply, access and ongoing vegetation management.

Land under the BMO is by default also a bushfire prone area, so the building requirements above apply as well. Where a planning permit is needed, the building permit application is assessed after the planning application, and bushfire protection already considered at the planning stage does not need to be considered again.

The BMO appears in the same planning property report and in VicPlan, as one of the overlays affecting the property.

Fire activity seen from satellites

Two free services map heat detected by satellites. Both are useful for seeing where fires have been burning, and both come with limits that matter.

DEA Hotspots

Geoscience Australia's DEA Hotspots is a national bushfire monitoring system that uses satellite thermal sensors to find possible fire locations. It draws on NASA's Aqua satellite (MODIS), the Suomi NPP, NOAA-20 and NOAA-21 satellites (VIIRS) and Japan's Himawari-9 geostationary satellite, updates every 10 minutes and covers 27 August 2002 to the present. It is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence.

Geoscience Australia is explicit about its limits:

  • A hotspot's position is accurate to ±375 m at best (VIIRS), however detailed the map.
  • Not all fires are detected, and some detections are not fires.
  • It is not published in real time and should not be used for safety of life decisions.

NASA FIRMS

NASA's Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) publishes active fire detections worldwide, generally within three hours of a satellite observation, on a best-effort basis. Each detection is a pixel flagged as containing one or more fires: about 375 m across for VIIRS and about 1 km for MODIS. The reported position is the centre of that pixel, and NASA notes it cannot determine the exact location or size of the fire.

Past fires

For where fires have burned before, the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action publishes Fire History Records of Fires across Victoria. It maps fires recorded since 1903, primarily on public land, and includes planned burns as well as bushfires. CFA records of fires on private land have been included since 2009, and fire severity since 2006. It is updated annually and published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence.

Because the record is built mainly from public land, a site on private land with no recorded fire before 2009 may simply have no record, not no fire.

See it on a map for your site

Terrascout's Discover map shows several of these layers together for an area you draw. The link opens on the Dandenong Ranges east of Melbourne; draw a box over your own site instead, then switch on:

  • Bushfire Prone VIC: the same designated Bushfire Prone Area map described above, drawn from the state's web map service.
  • DEA Hotspots: hotspots from the last three days.
  • Nasa Firms: VIIRS detections from the last three days, which you can click for details and download as CSV, GeoJSON or KML.
  • Capad Protected Areas: national parks and other protected areas from the national CAPAD database.

Two cautions. Discover is for orientation: for a decision about a specific property, rely on the planning property report or VicPlan, which are the official record. And Discover does not include the BMO or the fire history records, so check those at the sources above.

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