Wildfires and acres burned
Annual wildfire counts and acres burned for Idaho, from the National Interagency Coordination Center's state-by-state annual report tables, and for the United States, from NIFC's own national historical statistics table.
Publisher
- Organization
- National Interagency Fire Center
- Publisher’s dataset
- Wildland fires and acres burned, Idaho and the United States
- File or API used
- https://www.nifc.gov/fire-information/statistics/wildfires
- Retrieval script
scripts/fetch-nifc-wildfire.py- Methodology
- https://www.nifc.gov/nicc
Coverage
- Geography
- Idaho and the United States
- Time coverage
- 1983-2025 (US); 2003-2025, excluding 2008-2009 (Idaho)
- Update frequency
- Annual
- Published
- 2026
- Retrieved
- September 8, 2026
- License
- The compiled file on this page is CC BY 4.0. The underlying records: Public domain. U.S. federal government work.
Measures
| Measure | What it measures | Unit |
|---|---|---|
| Wildfires | Number of unplanned wildland fires (wildfires) across all jurisdictions in the year, excluding prescribed fires. | count |
| Acres burned | Acres burned by unplanned wildland fires (wildfires) across all jurisdictions in the year, excluding prescribed fires. | acres |
Caveats
- A 'fire' and 'acre burned' here means an unplanned wildland fire (wildfire) tracked by any NICC member agency in that state, across every jurisdiction: federal (BLM, Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs), state, and county or local. Neither series is federal land only.
- Prescribed (planned, intentionally set) fires and, for 2003-2007, Wildland Fire Use incidents (fires allowed to burn for resource benefit under a management plan) are excluded from both series; only unplanned wildfire ignitions are counted.
- The Idaho series' underlying NICC table changed format twice: 2003-2007 it reports Wildland, Rx (prescribed) and WFU fires/acres as three separate figures; 2010 onward it drops WFU and, from roughly 2018 on, splits fires by cause (human-caused vs lightning-caused) instead of by planned-vs-unplanned, with the Total column across both causes used as the wildfire figure. The basis (all-jurisdiction wildfire only, prescribed and WFU excluded) is the same throughout; only the table's own column layout differs.
- Idaho has no observation for 2000-2002 (the annual report for those years carries no per-state table) or 2008-2009 (the per-state table exists in those two years' reports but is rendered as an image or a layout pdftotext cannot extract as rows); the series resumes cleanly in 2010.
- NIFC's own U.S. total table flags 2004 with a footnote: that year's U.S. fires and acres do not include North Carolina's state lands.
- U.S. fire counts before 1998 are visibly lower and more erratic than 1998 onward (as low as 18,229 fires in 1983 versus a 1998-2025 range of roughly 47,000-97,000); NIFC's page gives no explanation for this and the figures are carried as published rather than adjusted.
- Figures for the most recent one or two years in either series may be revised in a later NICC or NIFC release; the values here are what each source currently publishes as of retrieval.
Pages built on this dataset
Downloads
How to cite
Understand Idaho, “Wildland fires and acres burned, Idaho and the United States”, compiled from National Interagency Fire Center, Wildland fires and acres burned, Idaho and the United States. Retrieved September 8, 2026. https://understandidaho.com/data/nifc-wildfire/. CC BY 4.0.
Cite National Interagency Fire Center directly for the figures themselves.
This page was last updated .