US fire & wildfire statistics

Wildland fire (NIFC): annual wildfire counts and acres burned come from the National Interagency Fire Center's "Total Wildland Fires and Acres" table (source: the National Interagency Coordination Center). The series starts in 1983 — there is no official federal wildland-fire data before 1983, because the agencies did not yet use current reporting processes, so we never extend the chart backward. The 2004 row excludes North Carolina state lands (per NIFC's own footnote). The table adds one year each January.

Fire-management declarations (FEMA): the state and yearly declaration figures come from OpenFEMA's Disaster Declarations Summaries, filtered to declaration type FM (Fire Management Assistance). We count one declaration per distinct FEMA disaster number — identical to the counting rule on our disaster-declarations page — bucketed by the calendar year of the declaration date. Every FM declaration is single-state, so the state totals sum to the same 1,642 as the yearly totals. The series runs from 1970 and includes pre-2001 fire-suppression authorizations; the in-progress 2026 is excluded from the charts.

Residential fire (USFA): the two structure-fire tiles above are US Fire Administration figures — a separate dataset from wildland fire. A house fire is not a wildfire; we show the USFA numbers for context, clearly labelled, and never blend them into the wildfire series.

The underlying NIFC and FEMA data are US-government public domain; the USFA residential figures are USFA's. Our charts and tables are licensed CC BY 4.0 — reuse them with attribution to DisasterStatus. This page is not endorsed by FEMA or any federal agency.

Download the data: wildfires by year · FMAG by year · FMAG by state (CSV). Sources: NIFC Wildfires · OpenFEMA DisasterDeclarationsSummaries.