NERIS Public: Incident Basics Explained for Fire Departments

You're sitting in a budget hearing. A council member asks how your call volume compares to departments your size. You know your own numbers cold. The national comparison you'd use to answer that question, though, is built on incidents that happened two years ago.

That gap just closed. In August 2026, the U.S. Fire Administration and the NERIS team released NERIS Public: Incident Basics, a free national dataset of fire incident reports that refreshes multiple times per week. NERIS public data is now current data. Not a snapshot of 2024. Current data means that you are now going to be looking at what departments across the country submitted and approved in the last few days.

For the fire service, this is a real break from how national incident data has worked since the 1970s. The old pattern was simple: departments submitted, the data got aggregated and processed, and the public got an annual release a year or more after the fact. That dataset could answer historical questions. It couldn't inform a decision you were making this budget cycle.

This article covers what's actually in NERIS Public: Incident Basics, what your department can reasonably do with it, what it isn't built for, and why your own report approval process determines whether your community shows up in the national picture at all.

What Is NERIS Public: Incident Basics?

Incident Basics is a publicly available national dataset of fire incident records, pulled directly from reports departments are submitting through NERIS. The U.S. Fire Administration and the NERIS team announced it at IAFC's Fire Rescue International conference in Kansas City in August 2026.

Two things make it different from what came before.

First, it's current. The dataset covers a rolling 15-month window, and it updates several times a week. At any given moment it holds roughly the last 15 months of incidents nationally. As new approved reports come in, older ones roll off the back.

Second, it's open. There's no login, no data-sharing agreement, and no specialized software required to look at it. Anyone can open it in a web browser. It lives on the new NERIS Public section of the NERIS site, which the team has set up as the home for this dataset and the public releases planned after it.

If you're new to NERIS generally, our NERIS Resource Center is the right starting point before you dig into the public data.

Why Does Current Fire Data Matter More Than Annual Data?

Because most of the decisions a Fire Chief makes are about right now, and stale data can't speak to right now.

Think about the questions you actually get asked. Is our call volume trending up or down compared to similar communities? Are we seeing the same increase in a certain call type that the region is seeing? Did the mutual aid picture shift after the department two towns over cut a company? Those are current-year questions. A dataset published 14 months after the fact can't touch them.

Baylie Scott, a research scientist on the NERIS team, put it this way: "A report approved now is part of the national picture quickly." For anyone who spent a career waiting a year or more to see their own data reflected anywhere, that's a meaningful change.

It's worth being clear about what this doesn't replace. Incident Basics is a living feed, not the official record. More on that below.

What's Actually in the Dataset?

Each record in Incident Basics is one locally approved incident. Roughly 40 fields carry the information most commonly used for analysis:

• The submitting department. Which department filed the record.
• Timing. When the incident happened.
• Location. Address plus point geometry, meaning actual coordinates you can map.
• Incident types. The NERIS categories replacing the old NFIRS numeric codes.
• Aid direction. Whether aid was given, received, or neither.
• Displacements. Whether people were displaced from a structure.
• Location use. What the property was being used for.
• Fire protection systems. What was present at the location.
• Emerging hazards. The flags NERIS uses for newer risk categories.

The complete field definitions live in the NERIS Data Dictionary, and the Technical References section goes deeper for anyone on your staff who'll be working with the feed directly.

Just as important is what's left out. Unit-level response detail and incident narratives are withheld so the dataset can be published openly. That's a deliberate choice to not overshare sensitive data. It also shapes what you can and can't ask of the data.

What Can Your Department Use NERIS Public Data For?

The NERIS team is specific about this: the dataset is intended for call type and frequency analysis, strategic planning, and community risk reduction work. Here's what that looks like in practice for a Chief.

Benchmarking against departments that look like yours. You can filter to comparable departments and compare call type mix and volume. When you're arguing for a position, an apparatus, or a station, being able to say "here's what departments our size are running, and here's what we're running" carries more weight than the same claim without numbers behind it.

Understanding your regional picture. The aid direction field lets you see the give-and-take of mutual aid across your area. If your department is consistently on the giving end, that's documented, not anecdotal.

Targeting community risk reduction. Location use, fire protection systems, and mapped coordinates together let you see where certain incident types cluster. That's the raw material for a CRR program that goes after actual risk instead of assumed risk. If CRR is new territory for your department, it's worth understanding how prevention work ties back to incident data, since NERIS has health and safety and CRR modules still in development.

Building grant narratives. AFG and SAFER applications ask you to justify need. Current regional data beats two-year-old national averages when you're making that case.

Answering the fire board with this year's numbers. Sometimes the value is just not having to say "the most recent national data available is from 2024."

What Should You Not Use It For?

The NERIS team states it directly: Incident Basics is not intended for operational or tactical analysis. Take that seriously.

This is not a deployment study tool. Because unit-level response data is withheld, you can't do turnout and travel time analysis, you can't evaluate apparatus assignments, and you can't build a standards-of-cover document from it. Those analyses need your own internal records, and they need the detail this dataset intentionally strips out.

There's a second limit worth understanding before you cite anything publicly. Incident Basics is citable, and its fields, refresh cadence, and coverage window are documented. But it isn't the authoritative record. That role will belong to the Annual Archive that USFA plans to publish through OpenFEMA, FEMA's open data platform.

The practical rule: use Incident Basics when the question is current. Use the Annual Archive, once it's out, when the question requires the official number. A reporter checking regional activity, a state official reading a trend, or a Chief scoping an argument before committing to it are all good uses of the live feed. A figure going into a formal report that will be scrutinized line by line is a different situation.

How Do You Actually Get to the Data?

There are two front doors, and picking the right one saves time.

Use the Incident Basics Explorer if you're pulling local or state numbers. This is where most Chiefs and staff officers should start. The full national dataset is large, and querying it directly gets slow and cumbersome. The Explorer pulls from the same source feed, but the interface is built for fast, straightforward queries. It runs in a browser.

Use the ArcGIS feature service if you have an analyst working with the full dataset. Incident Basics is published as a hosted feature service in Esri's ArcGIS Online, with a corresponding REST API. If your county GIS department or a regional planning office already works in that environment, they can pull the feed straight into what they're doing.

Because it's a live service rather than a file, anything built on top of it stays current on its own. Dashboards and maps refresh as the data refreshes, with no one re-downloading a spreadsheet every quarter. If you need a fixed snapshot for a report, you can export the data in several formats.

Why Does Your Report Approval Process Show Up in National Data?

This is the part that most directly affects your department, and it's easy to miss.

Only locally approved incidents make it into Incident Basics. Not submitted. Approved. If your reports sit in a review queue for three weeks because a supervisor is on vacation and nobody else has the authority to close them out, your department is underrepresented in the national picture during those three weeks. If your crew applies incident types inconsistently, your community's risk profile looks different than it actually is.

That has never really mattered before, because nobody was looking at national data in anything close to real time. Now they are. Your county emergency manager, a reporter, a state fire office, or a neighboring Chief building a mutual aid argument can all pull your department's records this week.

None of that requires a heroic effort from your crew. It requires a reporting workflow where completing a report is fast, approval is routine rather than a bottleneck, and incident types are applied the same way by every member. That's a records management problem, and your RMS should be solving it rather than adding to it. RedAlert Desktop handles the NERIS workflow end to end, from incident creation through approval, submission, and status tracking, so the approval step is a quick review instead of an administrative pile-up. We also offer tools to speed up the NERIS reporting process like a CAD interface and Incident Templates.

If your department is still working through NERIS setup, our NERIS onboarding guide covers the full sequence, and the readiness checklist is the short version. If you are already behind on submissions, catching up does not mean re-entering a year of calls by hand. Our NERIS in RedAlert webinar walks through the full setup-to-submission workflow if you want to see it in practice.