Idaho wildfire acres burned

Organization

National Interagency Fire Center

Dataset

Wildland fires and acres burned, Idaho and the United States

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

Original file

https://www.nifc.gov/fire-information/statistics/wildfires

Methodology

https://www.nifc.gov/nicc

License

Public domain. U.S. federal government work.

Our copy

nifc-wildfire, built by scripts/fetch-nifc-wildfire.py

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.