Fire Danger, State by State

Your state burn authority and your county answer that, and every state page here links the page where the state publishes burn bans and permits. Burn bans in the United States are county orders, declared and lifted by county commissions, sheriffs and state foresters, with no national register, so the current status is theirs to publish and changes with each vote. What these pages carry alongside that link is today's National Weather Service fire weather and the federal fire record for each state.

Timing and confidence. NWS on the warning: "NWS issues a Red Flag Warning, in conjunction with land management agencies, to alert land managers to an ongoing or imminent critical fire weather pattern. NWS issues a Red Flag Warning when fire conditions are ongoing or expected to occur shortly." NWS on the watch: "A Watch alerts land managers and the public that upcoming weather conditions could result in extensive wildland fire occurrence or extreme fire behavior. A watch means critical fire weather conditions are possible but not imminent or occurring." Both are issued against fire weather zones rather than counties, and there are 3,535 of those zones across the 50 states, from six in New Hampshire to 293 in Texas. Neither product is a law. Many states suspend burning permits automatically while a warning is in force, but that is the state's rule, not the warning's.

The NWS glossary sets them out: "Red Flag criteria occurs whenever a geographical area has been in a dry spell for a week or two, or for a shorter period , if before spring green-up or after fall color, and the National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS) is high to extreme and the following forecast weather parameters are forecasted to be met: 1) a sustained wind average 15 mph or greater 2) relative humidity less than or equal to 25 percent and 3) a temperature of greater than 75 degrees F." In practice the local forecast office and the land management agencies agree criteria for each zone, so the exact wind and humidity thresholds differ from one part of the country to another. That is a feature: 25 percent relative humidity is unremarkable in Nevada and alarming in Georgia.

NIFC's own measure of how committed national firefighting resources are, on a scale of 1 to 5. It was at level 5 as of July 18, 2026 at 7:30 a.m. MDT. It is not a danger rating and it says nothing about any particular place: PL 5 means the national system is stretched, which is a statement about crews, aircraft and incident management teams rather than about the weather outside your window. NIFC moved the level 14 times during 2025 alone.

NIFC's record runs from 1983 and the last complete year, 2025, saw 77,850 wildfires and 5,131,474 acres. NIFC will not go back further than 1983 and says why: "Prior to 1983, the federal wildland fire agencies did not track official wildfire data using current reporting processes. As a result, there is no official data prior to 1983 posted on this site." So any chart you see running back to 1926 is using a different and less comparable series. As of September 2, 2026, NIFC reported 52,626 wildfires so far in 2026, 126 percent of the ten year average for fires and 163 percent for acres.

Yes, on federal data. USDA Forest Service, verbatim: "Each year, the Southeast burns nearly 6.5 million acres for forest management and 3.8 million acres for agriculture across federal, tribal, state, and private lands." Against that, NICC's own ten year average wildfire acres for the western Geographic Areas come to about 6.31 million acres a year including Alaska and about 4.94 million without it. USFS adds that "The Forest Service’s Southern Region is home to the largest hazardous fuels reduction program in the country with more than 60% of all prescribed fire occurring in the Southeast." Two caveats travel with the comparison: the two figures come from different programmes, NICC's reported wildfire totals against a USFS estimate across all ownerships, and "the West" here means NICC's Geographic Areas rather than any other definition.

Because the table is a reporting stream, not a census. Every per-state figure on this site comes from NICC's table headed "Figures are from the SIT/209 Application", the interagency Situation Report. Five states have no state agency row in it at all: Arkansas, Hawaii, Kansas, Kentucky, South Carolina. Their numbers describe federal and tribal land only. Kansas shows 37 fires for the whole of 2025, in a state that runs the Flint Hills prescribed burning season and thousands of grass fires a year. Read the low numbers as a fact about reporting and not about fire.

People, overwhelmingly, by count. Summing NICC's 50 state rows for 2025 gives 69,507 human caused ignitions against 8,292 lightning ones. By acres it is almost exactly even, 2,273,574 against 2,856,907, because lightning fires start in remote country and grow. The pattern flips by region: in the Southern Area human causes ran 36,040 fires in 2025 against 1,048 lightning ones, while in Alaska it was 217 against 248.

No, and NWS defines both. A wildfire is "Any free burning uncontainable wildland fire not prescribed for the area which consumes the natural fuels and spreads in response to its environment." A prescribed fire is "A management ignited or natural wildland fire that burns under specified conditions where the fire is confined to a predetermined area and produces the fire behavior and fire characteristics required to attain planned fire treatment and resource management objectives." NIFC published national prescribed fire totals through 2019, when 6,058,508 acres were treated, and the series stops there on NIFC's own page. The most recent national figure in that series, the last one NIFC published, is 7 years old.

NIFC and NICC for the fire record, NOAA National Weather Service for the live fire weather, the USDA Forest Service for prescribed fire context, the US Drought Monitor for drought, and each state's own agency for the burn rules. NIFC's licensing was checked from NIFC's own footer, which describes nifc.gov as an official Department of the Interior website and links to DOI's notice: "Generally, materials produced by federal agencies are in the public domain and may be reproduced without permission. However, not all materials appearing on this web site are in the public domain. Some materials have been donated or obtained from individuals or organizations and may be subject to restrictions on use." No photograph on this site comes from nifc.gov, because DOI warns that donated images on its sites may be restricted.