This interactive map displays active wildfire incidents across the United States, drawn from the National Interagency Fire Center’s IRWIN (Incident Resource Information System) database. Each dot is a reported fire incident — dot size reflects acreage and color shows containment status, from red for fully active fires to green for contained incidents. Click any fire to see incident details, including acreage, cause, personnel deployed, and structures destroyed.
Explore Active US Wildfire Incidents
How to Use This Map
Reading the Dots
Each circle represents a fire incident. Larger circles indicate larger fires by acreage. The color shows containment percentage:
- Red — 0% contained (active)
- Orange — 1 to 49% contained
- Yellow — 50 to 99% contained
- Green — 100% contained
- Gray — containment status unknown
Incident Popups
Click any fire dot to see the incident name, daily acreage, containment percentage, reported cause, discovery date, personnel assigned, and number of structures destroyed.
Fire Perimeters
Use the Show Perimeters checkbox to overlay mapped fire boundaries as red polygons. Perimeters are only available for larger fires that have been officially mapped by incident teams.
Measure Distance to the Nearest Fire
Click the Measure Distance button to enter measure mode — the cursor becomes a crosshair. Click anywhere on the map and a dashed line appears from that point to the nearest active fire incident, with the straight-line distance shown in miles and kilometers. Click Cancel Measure to exit.
About the Data
This map uses the USA Wildfires v1 feature service published by the National Interagency Fire Center via ArcGIS Online. The service is updated daily from the IRWIN system, which consolidates incident data from federal, state, and local fire management agencies across the United States.
Each incident record includes daily acreage, calculated acreage, percent contained, fire discovery date, containment and control dates, point of origin county and state, fire cause, incident management organization, management complexity, total personnel, and structures destroyed. This is incident management data — it describes how fires are being fought, not just where they are.
Small fires contained quickly may not appear if they were resolved before being entered into the IRWIN system. The data represents incidents reported through official federal and participating state channels.
Frequently Asked Questions
How current is the data?
The IRWIN service is updated daily. New incidents typically appear within 24 hours of being reported to the National Interagency Coordination Center.
What does percent contained mean?
Percent contained refers to the proportion of a fire’s perimeter that has a control line — a firebreak or natural barrier — that fire managers are confident will stop the fire spreading. A fire can be 100% contained but still burning inside the perimeter.
Why are some fires shown without containment data?
Containment percentage is reported by incident management teams and may not be available for all fires, particularly small or short-duration incidents. These appear as gray dots on the map.
Why is a fire shown as a point rather than a polygon?
The point marks the reported point of origin. Polygon perimeters are mapped separately and are only available for fires large enough to warrant aerial or ground mapping by incident teams.
Does this show all US wildfires?
The map shows incidents reported through the federal IRWIN system. It covers fires managed by federal agencies and many state agencies that report into the system. Some small local fires managed entirely at the local level may not be included.
What is IRWIN?
IRWIN stands for Incident Resource Information System. It is the shared data infrastructure used by the National Interagency Fire Center to track wildfire incidents, resources, and reporting across the United States. The National Interagency Fire Center publishes the underlying data used in this map.
