Florida Fire Map: How to Track Florida Wildfires Live in 2026

A Florida fire map has to show two things at once: fast-moving flame fronts in palmetto and pine, and slow muck fires that smolder in organic soil for weeks. Between January 1 and September 7, 2026, Florida recorded 3,127 wildfires and 281,579 acres burned across state and federal land.

What does a Florida fire map show right now?

A Florida fire map fuses official NIFC incident records and interagency WFIGS perimeters, NASA VIIRS and MODIS thermal detections, NOAA GOES heat detections and National Weather Service fire-weather alerts into one view. US Wildfire Tracker does that free in any browser, refreshing automatically every few minutes while the tab stays open.

Florida adds a complication no western state has: an enormous volume of legal fire. The Florida Forest Service issues roughly 88,000 burn authorizations in an average year, covering about 2.1 million acres of prescribed burning. Many of those show up to satellites as thermal anomalies that look identical to a wildfire.

That is what the fire probability tier is for. US Wildfire Tracker scores each detection on whether an official NIFC record is linked, how fresh the perimeter is and how recent the satellite heat is, hides weak signals below 25 percent probability by default, and warns explicitly that hotspots can reflect prescribed burns or industrial heat.

The second Florida complication is duration. A grass or palmetto fire is over in a day; a muck fire burning organic soil can smolder for weeks with almost no flame. Ground fuels such as peat, duff and muck produce large volumes of residual smoke through prolonged smoldering, which is exactly why Everglades managers work to keep the marsh wet enough that peat soil does not burn.

When is Florida's wildfire season?

Florida's peak wildfire season usually encompasses April, May and June, according to the Florida Forest Service, but the agency also describes the state's wildfire risk as year-round. Winter cold fronts cure fine fuels, spring drought dries the organic soil beneath them, and the summer rainy season eventually shuts the window.

An annual state observance in the first full week of April was established in recognition of Florida's devastating 1998 wildfire season, when more than half a million acres burned and 337 structures were damaged or destroyed. April is not an arbitrary choice of month.

Drought decides how bad a given spring gets. In April 2026 the National Interagency Fire Center predicted above-normal significant wildfire potential across the state, several areas were under Red Flag Warnings and 20 counties had enacted burn bans, with more than 1,500 wildfires and over 54,000 acres burned since January.

Which agencies fight wildfires in Florida?

The Florida Forest Service, a division of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, is the lead wildland fire agency. It manages more than 1 million acres of state forests and provides forest management assistance on more than 17 million acres of private and community forestland, and it is responsible for protecting homes, forestland and natural resources from wildfire.

Federal land adds a second layer. Of the 3,127 wildfires recorded through September 7, 2026, 2,924 were on state jurisdiction and 203 were federal — but the federal fires accounted for 67,908 of the 281,579 acres. National forests, national preserves and national wildlife refuges hold a disproportionate share of the big acreage.

Above both sits the Southern Area Coordination Center, the NIFC geographic area coordination center that mobilizes incident resources throughout the southeastern United States, and county fire rescue departments that run structure protection in the wildland urban interface.

Where do Florida wildfires usually burn?

The acreage concentrates in the flatwoods, prairies and drained wetlands of central and south Florida. The Florida Forest Service's own list of significant wildfires since 1981 is dominated by Broward, Miami-Dade, Glades, Palm Beach and Brevard counties — Everglades-margin country where sawgrass, muck and sabal palm hammocks meet development.

North Florida burns differently. The Bugaboo Fire of 2007 started in Baker County and ran through swamp and pine, and the Okefenokee-Pinhook system straddling the Georgia line is the state's largest continuous fuel bed. Our Georgia fire map guide covers the same complex from the northern side.

Muck and peat are the reason Florida acreage is so hard to contain. Fuel and substrate in the Everglades range from hardwoods and grass on rock in the pinelands to soft marl and short grass in prairies to deep muck soils supporting six-foot sawgrass, the National Park Service notes. Fire in that deep organic layer burns downward, not outward.

What are the largest wildfires in Florida history?

The Florida Forest Service publishes a table of significant wildfires with final acreages, and the top of it is a south Florida list. The Deceiving Fire in Broward County, which started April 16, 1999, is the largest single entry at 173,000 acres.

Season totals tell the other half of the story. The 1998 season burned more than half a million acres and damaged or destroyed 337 structures, and it remains the benchmark against which Florida measures a bad spring.

For national scale, NIFC's table records 5,131,474 acres burned across the whole United States in 2025 and 10,122,336 acres in 2020. Florida's contribution is modest in acreage but heavy in ignition count and in population exposure.

What weather drives Florida fire danger?

Florida fire danger is a drought index problem more than a wind problem. The Keetch-Byram Drought Index, a continuous scale from 0 to 800, estimates the dryness of soil and duff layers; it rises each rainless day in proportion to the daily high temperature and falls when it rains.

The Florida Forest Service calculates KBDI statewide by combining rain gauge observations with NEXRAD radar rainfall estimates from the National Weather Service, because Florida's thunderstorm rainfall varies dramatically over short distances. High KBDI means more available fuel and organic soil dry enough to burn and hard to extinguish.

Red Flag Warning criteria for Florida are set in the state's annual operating plan with the National Weather Service: relative humidity below 28 percent, winds of at least 15 mph, and an Energy Release Component of 26 or higher. A Red Flag Warning means those conditions are expected within 24 hours; a Fire Weather Watch covers 24 to 48 hours.

Why does Florida burn 2 million acres on purpose?

Florida leads the nation in the use of prescribed fire, and approximately 2 million acres of public and private land in the state are treated with prescribed fire each year. The Florida Forest Service issues roughly 88,000 authorizations annually covering about 2.1 million acres, and has treated more than 580,000 acres of state forests since the beginning of 2023.

The legal frame is Chapter 590 of the Florida Statutes and Chapter 5I-2 of the Florida Administrative Code, with Chapter 62-256 covering yard trash. Florida was one of the pioneers in offering a certified burner program for both acreage burns and pile burns, and Prescribed Fire Councils across the state coordinate practice among agencies, landowners and contractors.

For anyone reading a live map, the practical consequence is that a large share of Florida's satellite heat signals in winter and early spring are deliberate. Prescribed fire reduces hazardous fuel buildups, controls disease in young pines, improves wildlife habitat and maintains fire-dependent ecosystems — it is not a map error.

How do evacuations and burn bans work?

Florida has no statewide Ready-Set-Go ordinance in the way parts of the West do, but the Florida Forest Service publishes a Ready, Set, Go guide and evacuation planning material, and the orders themselves come from county emergency management and law enforcement. There is no single statewide evacuation vocabulary; follow your county.

Burn bans work at two levels. County-enacted burn bans are issued by county governments and reported to the Florida Forest Service, which publishes a county burn ban map; state burn bans are enacted by state government and cover larger areas. In April 2026, 20 counties had bans in place.

Practical preparation is unglamorous and effective: create defensible space, use Firewise landscaping, keep an evacuation route in mind, and know that escaped debris burning is one of the leading causes of wildfires in Florida.

How do you read a Florida fire map fast?

The goal is to separate an authorized prescribed burn from an uncontrolled wildfire, and a flaming front from a smoldering muck fire, in about sixty seconds.

1. Open the live fire map and filter to Florida, or use "fires near me" to list incidents within a set distance in miles of your location.
2. Read the probability tier before anything else. A high tier means an official NIFC record is attached; a low tier in February or March is very often a prescribed burn.
3. Open the fire and compare the "Last NIFC update", "Last satellite heat" and "Last GOES heat" timestamps. Fresh heat with a stale official record means conditions are outrunning the reporting.
4. Check acres, containment and incident type. Muck and swamp fires often sit at high acreage and low containment for weeks without moving much.
5. Look for a Red Flag Warning polygon over the same ground, and check the county burn ban map if you were planning to burn anything yourself.
6. If you need to move, use the directions-away links and follow only the evacuation instructions issued by your county.

If you want the general mechanics rather than the Florida specifics, our fire tracker guide explains each data layer and its latency in depth, and the fires near me guide covers the geolocation workflow.

What does wildfire smoke do to Florida air quality?

Smoke is the Florida wildfire hazard that reaches the most people. Muck and peat fires burn low and slow, so their smoke stays near the ground, drifts onto highways at night and can persist long after the flame front is gone.

Air quality is reported on the EPA Air Quality Index, where a value of 100 generally corresponds to the level of the short-term national ambient air quality standard for a pollutant.

US Wildfire Tracker carries smoke and air-quality overlays alongside the fire layers, and our forest fire smoke tracker guide explains why a NOAA satellite smoke plume and a ground monitor often disagree. On muck fire nights, the ground monitor is usually the one telling the truth about your driveway.

Frequently asked questions about the Florida fire map