ESO Closes NFIRS Era with 2026 Fire Service Index, Sets the Stage for Richer Data Under NERIS Reporting Standard

The eighth edition finds decontamination documentation improving, year-round wildland fire activity and EV fires largely invisible in national data

AUSTIN, Texas, June 02, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ESO Solutions, Inc. (“ESO”), a leading data services and software provider for EMS, fire departments, hospitals, and government agencies, today released the 2026 ESO Fire Service Index, the annual benchmark for fire service operations built on the ESO Data Collaborative, the industry's largest integrated emergency incident data asset. The eighth edition draws on over 10.2 million incidents from 3,805 departments—the largest dataset in the report's history—and covers calendar year 2025, the last full year of incident reporting under the National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS).

The eighth edition's most significant findings include:

• Among incidents with documented fire or smoke exposure, 77% included at least one decontamination step, but documentation of all four foundational on-scene best practices occurred in about 2% of exposure incidents.
• Wildland fire activity—a subcategory of outdoor fires—is a year-round operational reality. Wildland fires peaked in March with more than 16,000 incidents, but activity persisted in every month of the year, including over 3,700 incidents in December. The wildland fire count rose 48% from the previous edition, but total acreage dropped from 1.78 million to under 700,000.
• Rescue and EMS incidents continue to drive the majority of fire department call volume, accounting for 66% of total responses, a distribution that has remained consistent even as the dataset grew by more than 1,000 departments and 2.3 million incidents.
  
  

"The fire service has been operating with a data standard designed in 1975, a system that was never built to capture how many people departments rescued, what actions they took on scene or even whether a structure fire was in a single-family home or an apartment complex," said Bill Gardner, executive director of fire and EMS at ESO. “Those limitations show up in every staffing request, every grant application, every cancer-related disability claim where a firefighter's exposure history should be in the record but isn't. NERIS changes that. Departments can track multiple incident types to give a clearer picture of what they are doing, connect structure types to outcomes and demonstrate community impact to the elected officials who fund them.”

The operational reality of year-round wildland fires increasingly places mutual aid demands on departments called to support operations outside their jurisdictions. Seventy-two percent of outdoor fires have no cause recorded, a documentation gap that limits insight into prevention and risk reduction strategies.

Across 28,876 incidents with documented fire or smoke exposure, representing 134,925 individual personnel exposures, 77% included at least one decontamination step, up from 75% in the previous edition.

"Two percentage points might not sound like much, but we're talking about changing 150 years of culture in a workforce that has real concerns about what exposure documentation could mean for their employment, insurance or disability claims," said Gardner. "Those concerns are understandable. But the record works in their favor, not against them: Consistent documentation is what supports those very claims down the line. Firefighters are starting to understand that."

More from the 2026 ESO Fire Service Index
The report also examined structure fires, first apparatus response times and, for the first time, electric vehicle fires. Residential properties accounted for 79% of structure fire responses, with working fires rising to 61% from 57% the prior year. Automatic extinguishing systems were present in just 7% of structure fire incidents—unchanged from the previous edition—underscoring the need for broader residential fire sprinkler adoption across both single-family and multifamily housing. Only 19 EV and e-bike fire incidents were identified across 10 different incident type classifications—a figure that likely understates actual EV-related fires, given the absence of a dedicated NFIRS code. NERIS introduces a standardized classification for electrical storage systems, and future editions will show whether the low count reflects a reporting gap or a genuine baseline.

The ESO Fire Service Index is one of three annual reports produced by the ESO Research
and Performance Improvement team alongside the ESO EMS Index and ESO Trauma Index. Access the 2026 ESO Fire Service Index here. For more information on ESO, visit www.eso.com.

Methodology and limitations
The 2026 ESO Fire Service Index uses data compiled from 3,805 participating agencies using ESO Fire RMS, representing 10,237,656 incidents from Jan. 1 through Dec. 31, 2025. Data was extracted from the ESO Data Collaborative. All data is retrospective. This report is a descriptive analysis and does not establish causation. The dataset represents agencies using ESO Fire RMS and may not be representative of all departments nationally. Incident reporting practices vary by agency, and some data fields have significant rates of missing values.

About ESO
ESO’s mission is to improve community health and safety outcomes through the power of data. Founded and led by emergency responders and medical professionals since 2004, ESO advances the industry by combining deep domain expertise with innovative technology, impactful research and the industry’s largest integrated emergency outcome data asset. The company delivers the world's most trusted and connected emergency ecosystem—an open, interoperable platform that unites emergency medical response, fire, hospital and government stakeholders across the full emergency continuum through real-time data exchange and embedded intelligence in frontline workflows. ESO’s solutions deliver actionable insights to decision-makers, enable smarter coordination across the emergency continuum and uphold the highest standards of data security and patient privacy. The company helps customers around the world deliver measurable improvements in clinical, operational and financial outcomes with dedicated teams in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Denmark, Czech Republic, India and Costa Rica. For more information, visit www.eso.com. 

Media Contact:
For ESO,
Anika Grendell
Red Fan Communications
eso@redfancommunications.com
512-662-7078

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