Use this tool to find the estimated average number of fires, civilian deaths, civilian injuries, and direct property damage resulting from fires per year for incidents reported to local U.S. fire departments during the five-year period of 2015-2019.
Directions: Select the incident type in the red box; For more detail, click "Major property class" and then click the “+” that appears immediately below; Use the scrollbar to the right of the Property Loss column to navigate through the table. For full details, repeat with the Minor Property Class.
More information: Incident type definitions | Property use categories | More about the data
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Incident type definitions
- Structure fires - Any fire in or on a building or other structure is considered a structure fire even if the structure itself was not damaged. Mobile property used as a fixed structure, such as manufactured homes and portable buildings, are considered structures. A vehicle that burns inside a structure with the fire limited the vehicle is considered a vehicle fire.
- Vehicle fires - Vehicles include highway-type vehicles (cars, trucks, recreational vehicles, buses, and motorcycles) as well as aircraft, rail vehicles, boats or water vehicles, and industrial, agricultural, home, garden, and construction vehicles.
- Outside and other fires - This category includes any fire that is not a structure or vehicle fire, including:
- Outside grass, brush, forest, crop or other vegetation fires;
- Outside trash fires;
- Outside fire involving property of value, such as storage or equipment; and
- Unclassified fires
Property use categories
The occupancies shown are based on categories in the property use field in NFIRS. The numeric NFIRS property use codes are shown next to the brief definitions. Categories are generally presented in the order of the code choices. Fires in which the property use was coded as other, none, undetermined, or not reported were grouped together as “unclassified, unreported or unknown.” More detailed definitions are available in the National Fire Incident Reporting System 5.0 Complete Reference Guide.
In some cases, the property use entered may actually reflect a larger property. For example, a vehicle fire at an office building may have occurred in the parking lot.
Note that the property use categories are independent of and do NOT correspond exactly to occupancy definitions used by NFPA codes and standards or to the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS).
More about the data
These estimates were derived from Version 5.0 of the U.S. Fire Administration’s National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS) and NFPA’s annual Fire Experience Survey (FES). Fires reported to federal, state or industrial fire brigades are not included in these statistics. To compensate for fires that were reported to local fire departments but not to NFIRS, multipliers were derived by dividing the estimated totals from NFPA’s fire experience survey by NFIRS totals. NFIRS data were multiplied by the result. Fires in which mutual aid was given were excluded from this analysis. Property damage was not adjusted for inflation. Because the frequency of fires and losses varies widely, estimates have not been rounded. Users are strongly urged to round them in their reports.
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