Report Retention Policy
The National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS) was a voluntary reporting standard that fire departments used to uniformly report on the full range of their activities, from fire to emergency medical services to severe weather and natural disasters. All incident records were created and are owned by the local fire department or other authority having jurisdiction. The U.S. Fire Administration (USFA) only receives and uses copies of these records for analysis and reporting. The USFA no longer has access to NFIRS-based incident records, as the system was retired in January 2026 and decommissioned in February 2026.
If you are looking for an incident report, we recommend contacting the local fire department(s) that responded to the scene. Some fire departments may have copies of NFIRS reports from incidents which they responded to as they used third-party software to create incidents for submission into eNFIRS. For fire departments that created incident records directly into eNFIRS, these reports are not retrievable. In some situations, the Office of the State Fire Marshal or the state, tribal or territorial reporting authority may have a copy of such a record.
At this time, the data available are the publicly released files accessible through the open data website, which can be found at NFIRS Public Data Release (PDR) data. The USFA is currently processing the 2025 PDR files, which are anticipated to be available within the coming months.
If you have questions, please contact your state of reporting authority or the authority having jurisdiction.
Learn more about accessing NFIRS data
National Emergency Response Information System Records
National Emergency Response Information System (NERIS) data is stored outside the federal government through the Fire Service Research Institute’s infrastructure. Some of the information found in the reports will be made available through the free, publicly available NERIS Public tool.