National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS)

NFIRS will sunset in February 2026 and will no longer be available. Learn about key points and dates in the NFIRS sunset and transition to NERIS for fire-based, all-hazards incident reporting and analytics.

Any information you submitted to this database will no longer be accessible to you.

 If you have been using NFIRS as your records retention system and rely on it to access copies of your incidents, you must retrieve them from the system before the end of the year. Once the system is decommissioned, the incidents will be permanently lost. 

Fire departments have several ways to obtain information:

1) Use the Form-Based Incident Report utility to export printable PDFs of your reports, up to 5 at a time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbMnNCEyGWg This process takes about a minute per job. The impact on the system is minimal, but it can be time-consuming. Once the job is sent, you can submit another one simultaneously for FBIR, because by the time you request another set of 5, the first job will be completed. The data cannot be analyzed, but it is useful for generating reports of all the calls the fire department responded to.

2) Use the Export Incidents Utility to export raw text files, up to 1 year at a time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jda6L_noPXI Once the files are done exporting, which takes less than a day per job, you can import them into the Records Management Software (RMS) of your choice to both read and analyze the data in the proper format. A list of current RMS vendors can be found here. https://www.usfa.fema.gov/nfirs/vendors/active-vendors.html. This impact is not too bad, and we have safeguards in place to prevent too many incidents from being exported at once (or the system crashing).

3) Use the Data Warehouse to run table reports. One common report is the Excel Export, which runs in just a few minutes. We have new versions of the Excel Export that allow fire departments to obtain all data from their incident reports and all modules, minus the Incident Remarks, Persons Involved, Property Owner, Officer in Charge, and Member Making Report. This Excel Export is not suitable for making a copy of the incident report, but it is fantastic for data analysis. The system has safeguards in place to prevent excessive data requests from a fire department. A Quick Start Guide on how to use the Data Warehouse is here: https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/nfirs/nfirs-data-warehouse-reports-tool-quick-start-guide.pdf

Illinois Fire Departments are required by state law to report all incidents, including medical incidents, to the National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS), which is administered by the United States Fire Administration. Data submission can be completed in one of two ways:

• Direct Entry using the web-based reporting tool. 

Importing data from third-party vendor software.

 All NFIRS applications are now web-based, and Microsoft Edge is recommended as the web browser for accessing the website at https://nfirs.fema.gov.