Access NFIRS data
NFIRS public data release
The U.S. Fire Administration (USFA) has compiled publicly released National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS) incidents, collected by states during the previous calendar year, into a public data release (PDR) that is available free of charge. Beginning in January 2026, NFIRS was decommissioned and all fire department reporting moved to the National Emergency Response Information System (NERIS). Therefore, 2025 was the last year for which the NFIRS PDR was produced.
NFIRS PDR files from 1980 to 2025 are available for download on OpenFEMA. Data available includes:
- 1980-1998 – Fire incidents (NFIRS version 4.1)
- 1999-2003 – All incidents
- 2004-2024 – Fire and hazardous materials incidents
- 2014-2024 – All incidents
Public data release on OpenFEMA
- The PDR is a relational database of 20 tables tied together by a 2-, 5- or 6-variable key. Tables are zipped and in text CSV format for data after 2012 and dBASE format for prior years.
- Reference documentation, including “NFIRS 5.0 Fire Data Analysis Guidelines and Issues” and “NFIRS Complete Reference Guide,” is included.
- Spreadsheet software from productivity suites is generally not suitable for working with or analyzing the raw data.
- A database management system and expertise in SQL and/or other database programming language is necessary.
- This database is for researchers and fire data analysts. You should have considerable experience with fire data analysis and NFIRS data to properly use the PDR. Using raw NFIRS data as a count of fires and associated deaths, injuries and dollar loss is not a proper use of the PDR.
The GeoPackage (gpkg) offerings are geocoded versions of the annual PDR, and they are available for 2014-2025.
A “lite” version of the GeoPackage PDR can be found on ArcGis Online by searching for “U.S. Fire Department Responses.” These feature layers are available for 2019-2025. The feature layer is a simplified version of the PDR dataset containing the fields most commonly used for analyses.
National Fire Incident Reporting System data disclaimer
The data disclaimer below applies to all PDR products featured on OpenFEMA:
The data presented in the PDR reflect only a snapshot in time. The NFIRS is not a repository of all incidents that occur in the United States. The NFIRS is a voluntary system, and it includes only those incidents reported to the system by fire departments that participate. Data available may vary, depending on the frequency of incident reporting and by the frequency of data imported to the NFIRS by the fire department or state. Not all states participate in the NFIRS each year, and all fire departments that report to the NFIRS within a state do not necessarily report all of their incidents. In addition, some fire departments that report fire incidents do not report all information within a report, including associated casualties or estimated dollar losses. States and/or fire departments that report in one particular year may not report to the NFIRS the following year. Therefore, the NFIRS is not a census of all incidents or casualties. As a result, reported NFIRS data should not be used to represent total counts of incidents and associated losses (i.e., casualties and dollar loss) at the national or state levels.
National Fire Incident Reporting System Version 5.0 Fire Data Analysis Guidelines and Issues PDF discusses analytic considerations and methods of analyzing fire incident data using NFIRS version 5.0. The topics include the NFIRS 5.0 data structure, general quality assurance issues, and definitions and parameters of common fire analyses (e.g., residential structure fires or fires by a specific cause).
Collecting data is a legal requirement for documenting incidents; however, incident reports provide a more beneficial service to fire departments by providing insight into the nature of fires and injuries.
The Fire Data Analysis Handbook PDF describes statistical techniques to turn data into information that fire departments can use to gain insights into fire problems, improve resource allocation for preventing fires and identify training needs. The techniques range from simple to complex. Described are how to:
- Develop charts to provide more effective presentations about fire problems.
- Compute simple statistics, such as means, medians and modes.
- Create tables and calculate different percentages from tables.
- Perform correlation, regression, log-linear analysis and queueing theory.
These are all techniques that can tell fire departments more about the nature of fires and injuries.
The files below contain instructional information useful in the analysis of NFIRS 4.1 historical data. The USFA stopped accepting NFIRS 4.1 data on Jan. 1, 2010.