About NFIRS

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The National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS) is a voluntary reporting standard that fire departments use to uniformly report on the full range of their activities, from fire to emergency medical services to severe weather and natural disasters.

Facts about NFIRS

Source: 2023 NFIRS Public Data Release

The NFIRS is the world's largest, national, annual database of fire incident information.

22,695
fire departments reported to NFIRS in 2023.

Over 33.1 million
responses to all types of incidents were reported by participating fire departments, including nearly 1.3 million fire responses in 2023.

The NFIRS is not a complete census of reported fires in the United States. It comprises about 70% of all fire incidents that occur annually.

Every U.S. state, the District of Columbia, and departments in the Native American Tribal Authorities report NFIRS data. In 2023, American Samoa and Puerto Rico also reported some incidents to the NFIRS.

Benefits of using NFIRS

Fire departments can use NFIRS to track and manage apparatus, personnel and casualty information, document the full range of department activity, and justify budgets with summary and statistical data.
Fire departments can use NFIRS data to focus on current community challenges, predict future issues, and measure program performance.
The modular design of NFIRS makes the system easy to use because it captures only the data required to describe an incident.

By contributing to NFIRS, fire departments help the U.S. Fire Administration (USFA) to:

Analyze the severity and reach of the nation's fire problem.
Use NFIRS information to develop national public education campaigns.
Make recommendations for national codes and standards.
Determine consumer product failures.
Identify the focus for research efforts.
Support federal legislation.

How NFIRS works

After responding to an incident, a fire department completes the appropriate NFIRS modules. Each module collects a common set of information that describes the nature of the call, the actions firefighters took in response to the call, and the end results, including firefighter and civilian casualties and a property loss estimate.

The fire department submits its all-incident data to the state, tribal or territorial agency responsible for NFIRS data. The agency gathers data from all its participating departments and reports the compiled data to the USFA. The fire department can also submit their data directly to the USFA’s NFIRS national database through import tools designed specifically for this process.

The NFIRS software is available at no cost to states, tribal, territorial agencies and fire departments.

Contact your state NFIRS program manager or the NFIRS Help Desk to learn more about NFIRS.