Dorm Fire Statistics, 2020 to 2024: Campus Housing Fires in NFIRS and College Disclosures

The market in brief

• NFIRS holds 11,145 fires in dormitories, fraternity and sorority houses and barracks for 2020 to 2024, 2,229 a year on average; excluding a 2024 FDNY reporting gap, the count rose 38.2% from 2020 to 2024.
• Confined cooking fires were 81.1% of campus housing structure fires, against 60.4% in apartments.
• September is the peak month (11.4% of structure fires, 2021 to 2024) and July the low; April to July 2020 fires ran 31.0% below normal.
• 39.2% of campus structure fires were reported between 5 p.m. and 9:59 p.m.
• A full AES was present in 53.1% of non-confined campus fires and smoke detectors in 84.1%, far above apartments (16.6% and 64.5%).
• 13.7% of non-confined campus fires spread beyond the room of origin, against 29.9% in apartments.
• Colleges disclosed 1,687 on-campus housing fires for 2024, up 41.4% from 2020; the federal file has no sprinkler data.

Dorm fire statistics by year, 2020 to 2025

Fire departments reported 11,145 fires in campus-type housing to NFIRS from 2020 to 2024, an average of 2,229 a year. The count bottomed out in the pandemic years; adjusted for a 2024 reporting gap in New York City, it dipped only slightly in 2024.

Fires in NFIRS property codes 460 (dormitory-type residence, other), 462 (sorority or fraternity house) and 464 (barracks, dormitory) numbered 1,936 in 2020, 1,842 in 2021, 2,471 in 2022, 2,527 in 2023 and 2,369 in 2024 (NFIRS PDR). That is a 22.4% rise from 2020 to 2024, consistent with students returning after remote instruction.

Participation in NFIRS changes from year to year, so the table also expresses campus housing fires per 1,000 fires of all kinds in NFIRS: 2.32 in 2020 and 2.46 in 2024. Code 460 carries most of the volume; fraternity and sorority houses (462) add 81 to 162 fires a year.

Campus housing (this report): NFIRS property codes 460, 462 and 464. NFIRS has no code reserved for college residence halls; the reference guide lists nurses' quarters, military barracks, convent dormitories, bunk houses and workers' barracks under 464. We kept 464 because residence halls are also coded there, and report it separately.

The academic calendar shows up in the fire record

Campus housing fires track occupancy: September is the busiest month, July the quietest, and the December break cuts fires by about a quarter.

Across 2021 to 2024, September averaged 236.2 structure fires in campus housing and July 99.5, a ratio of 2.4 to 1. September alone held 11.4% of the year's structure fires and September to November 32.8%, while the three summer months held 17.0%.

December averaged 164.2 fires, 23.6% below November (215.0), as finals end and halls empty; January rebounded to 187.5. In 2020, April to July produced 378 structure fires against an average of 548.1 for the same months in 2021 to 2024, 31.0% lower, which matches the spring 2020 campus closures.

The weekly pattern is flatter. Sunday had the largest share of 2020 to 2024 structure fires (15.9%) and Friday the smallest (13.2%).

Cooking fires and the evening peak

Four in five campus housing structure fires are small cooking fires confined to the pan or appliance, and they cluster between late afternoon and late evening.

Of 10,049 structure fires in campus housing in 2020 to 2024, 8,150 (81.1%) were coded as cooking fires confined to the container (incident type 113). In apartments the same share was 60.4%. All confined types together, including trash and fuel burner fires, made up 86.9% of campus structure fires.

The busiest alarm hour was 7 p.m. to 7:59 p.m. with 843 fires. Between 5 p.m. and 9:59 p.m., NFIRS recorded 39.2% of campus housing structure fires and 41.6% of confined cooking fires. Non-confined fires were more spread out: 19.0% began between midnight and 5:59 a.m., against 9.0% of cooking fires.

Where the larger fires start: bedrooms, kitchens and laundry rooms

The 1,319 non-confined fires, the ones that escape a container, have a different cause profile: cooking drops to 7.1% and appliances, electrical faults and careless acts move up.

Using the USFA cause hierarchy, cooking accounted for 81.8% of all campus housing structure fires but 7.1% of non-confined ones. Among non-confined fires, the cause was unknown in 18.3%, appliances caused 12.0%, other unintentional or careless acts 11.1%, electrical malfunction 10.2%, open flame 8.1% and intentional setting 6.0%.

Bedrooms were the area of origin for 22.3% of non-confined fires, kitchens for 19.8%, laundry areas for 10.8% and bathrooms for 8.3%. The heat source was undetermined in 25.5% and the item first ignited in 26.4%, so the coded detail below describes roughly three quarters of these fires.

Sprinklers, smoke detectors and how far fires spread

Campus housing fires are far more likely than apartment fires to occur in a building with sprinklers and working detectors, and far less likely to leave the room where they started.

In non-confined fires from 2020 to 2024, a full automatic extinguishing system (AES) was present in 53.1% of campus housing fires and 16.6% of apartment fires; presence was undetermined or blank in 7.4% and 9.3%. Excluding unknowns, the campus share rises to 57.4%. Smoke detectors were present in 84.1% of campus fires and operated in 68.0% of all of them, against 64.5% and 42.8% in apartments.

Only 13.7% of non-confined campus housing fires with known spread went beyond the room of origin, compared with 29.9% in apartments. With an AES present, 5.6% of campus fires spread beyond the room; with none, 24.2%. The 6 civilian deaths in campus housing fires in 2020 to 2024 all occurred in buildings reported as having no AES (4) or a partial system (2); fires with an AES present had none among 701 fires.

Fire deaths across all property types are compared by state in our fire deaths by state report.

Sprinkler design follows NFPA 13 and alarm systems NFPA 72, as adopted by your state. Inspection frequencies for both systems are summarized on our fire sprinkler and fire alarm inspection pages, and residential smoke alarm rules by state are in smoke detector laws by state.

Fraternity and sorority houses compared with dormitories

Fraternity and sorority houses report far fewer fires, but a larger share of them are outdoor fires and building fires that escape a container, and their detectors were less often credited with alerting occupants.

Property code 462 logged 620 fires in 2020 to 2024 against 9,287 in code 460. Outdoor or other fires (rubbish, grass, open burning) were 24.2% of fraternity and sorority house fires and 8.2% of dormitory-type fires. Non-confined fires were 17.6% of 462 structure fires and 12.0% of 460 structure fires.

Sprinkler presence was close: a full AES in 52.4% of non-confined 462 fires and 53.5% of 460 fires. Spread beyond the room was also close (13.4% and 13.8%). The gap is in alerting: in confined fires with a known answer, the detector did not alert occupants in 16.7% of 462 fires and 6.1% of 460 fires. No civilian deaths were reported in code 462 in 2020 to 2024; with 82 non-confined fires, the base is small.

What colleges' federal fire disclosures add

Colleges with on-campus housing must report every fire in each residence building to the Department of Education. Those disclosures count more small fires than NFIRS, but they cover only on-campus housing and they do not include sprinkler information.

Under 20 U.S.C. 1092(i) and 34 CFR 668.49, an institution with on-campus student housing publishes an annual fire safety report with the number and cause of fires, injuries, deaths and property damage for each facility, plus a description of each facility's fire safety system, including sprinklers. Only the statistics are sent to the Secretary, so the sprinkler descriptions stay in each school's own report and are not in the federal download.

We downloaded the fire statistics for every institution from the Department's Campus Safety and Security custom data tool. For calendar 2024, 2,046 institutions listed 34,740 on-campus housing facilities and disclosed 1,687 fires; 3.9% of facilities and 29.5% of institutions had at least one fire. Disclosed fires rose 41.4% from 2020 (1,193), the same pandemic recovery seen in NFIRS.

The disclosures use a wider definition of fire: any open flame or burning in a place not intended to contain it. That pulls in scorched posters, burned door tags and trash-can fires. Cooking was the cause of 50.3% of disclosed fires in 2020 to 2024, against 81.8% of NFIRS campus structure fires, and 10.8% were intentional. Damage was under $1,000 in 85.9% of disclosed fires; 97 fires caused $100,000 or more. Colleges disclosed 9 fire-related deaths and 131 injuries for 2020 to 2024.

Then and now: university housing fires in 2007 to 2009 and 2020 to 2024

Set against USFA's last university housing report, the timing and cooking pattern has not moved, but sprinkler presence in the larger fires has risen by about 12 percentage points.

USFA's 2011 report on 2007 to 2009 data found that confined cooking fires were 81% of university housing fires, September held 12% and September to November 33% (USFA). Our 2020 to 2024 figures are 81.1%, 11.4% and 32.8%.

The same report counted an AES in 41.6% of non-confined university housing fires (401 of 964 raw NFIRS records). For dormitory-type residences and fraternity and sorority houses (460 and 462) in 2020 to 2024, the share is 53.5%, about 11.9 percentage points higher. Smoke alarms were present in 85% of 2007 to 2009 non-confined fires in occupied university housing; detectors were present in 84.1% of 2020 to 2024 campus fires, a similar level measured on a slightly different base. School building guidance is on our schools page.

Local benchmarks we calculated

Download the calculations (CSV)

What the numbers show

1. Fire departments reported 2,369 fires in campus-type housing (NFIRS codes 460, 462, 464) in 2024, up from 1,936 in 2020; excluding FDNY, whose 2024 reporting was incomplete, the counts were 2,328 and 1,684.^[1][5]
2. Campus housing fires equalled 2.46 per 1,000 NFIRS fires in 2024 and 2.32 in 2020.^[1][5]
3. 8,150 of 10,049 campus housing structure fires in 2020 to 2024 (81.1%) were cooking fires confined to the container.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}
4. September averaged 236.2 campus housing structure fires and July 99.5 in 2021 to 2024.^[2][3][4][5]
5. December fires averaged 23.6% fewer than November in 2021 to 2024.^[2][3][4][5]
6. The peak alarm hour was 7 p.m., with 843 of 10,049 structure fires in 2020 to 2024.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}
7. Among non-confined campus fires, cooking was the cause of 7.1%; appliances caused 12.0% and electrical malfunction 10.2%.^{[1][2][3][4][5][11]}
8. Bedrooms were the area of origin for 22.3% of non-confined campus fires and laundry areas for 10.8% (2020 to 2024).^{[1][2][3][4][5]}
9. A full AES was present in 53.1% of non-confined campus housing fires and 16.6% of apartment fires, 2020 to 2024.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}
10. Smoke detectors operated in 68.0% of non-confined campus fires, against 42.8% in apartments.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}
11. With an AES present, 5.6% of non-confined campus fires spread beyond the room; with none, 24.2%.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}
12. NFIRS records 6 civilian deaths and 48 injuries in campus housing fires in 2020 to 2024; none of the deaths occurred where a full AES was present.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}
13. In fraternity and sorority house confined fires with a known answer, detectors did not alert occupants 16.7% of the time, against 6.1% in dormitory-type residences.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}
14. Colleges disclosed 1,687 fires in 34,740 on-campus housing facilities for 2024; 3.9% of facilities had at least one.^[13]
15. Cooking caused 50.3% of fires disclosed by colleges in 2020 to 2024, and 10.8% were intentional.^[13]

Frequently asked questions

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Methodology

Selection: we queried every fire incident (NFIRS incident types 100 to 173) in the FEMA/USFA NFIRS Public Data Release for 2020 to 2025 with property use 460 (dormitory-type residence, other), 462 (sorority house, fraternity house) or 464 (barracks, dormitory). Apartments (429) were computed the same way as a reference group only. Structure fires are incident types 111 to 123; confined fires are 113 to 118.

Barracks decision: code 464 also covers military barracks, nurses' quarters, convent dormitories and workers' barracks, and code 460 is a catch-all. We kept all three codes, show each separately, and checked fire department names: departments with military-type names reported 48 of the 2020 to 2024 fires (7 in code 464), 0.43% of the total. A name match cannot catch every federal department.

Exclusions: mutual and automatic aid given (AID 3 and 4) per USFA guidance, incident keys that appear more than once in a year (the 2025 errata lists 45 duplicate pairs), and the incidents that USFA errata say to exclude. Dollar-loss medians exclude placeholder values of $9,999,999 or more.

Unknowns: every field table shows the undetermined or blank share. Percentages use all fires as the denominator unless the column says known values only. Fire module fields (area of origin, heat source, item first ignited, AES, detectors, spread) are taken from non-confined fires, where the module is complete; confined fires use the detector alert field on the basic incident record.

Timing: month and weekday come from the incident date; hour comes from the alarm time. The month curve uses 2021 to 2024 because 2020 was disrupted by campus closures. 2025 is excluded from trends: USFA's release notes report fewer participating departments as NFIRS was decommissioned in February 2026, and December 2025 campus housing structure fires were 37.1% below December 2024.

Trend check: FDNY (New York, FDID 24001) filed far fewer records in the 2024 release than in 2023 (a reporting gap flagged by a sibling analysis of the same database). We therefore show campus housing fires excluding FDNY and for a fixed panel of 16,661 departments that reported at least one fire to NFIRS in every year from 2020 to 2024, also excluding FDNY. Trend statements use those columns; shares (cooking, timing, sprinklers, spread) use all records, where FDNY's 2024 gap shifts the totals only slightly.

College disclosures: we downloaded the Department of Education Campus Safety and Security fire statistics (Total Fires by On-campus Student Housing Facility; Detailed Fire Data) for all institutions, calendar years 2020 to 2024, through the site's public custom data tool, and aggregated them. Free-text cause entries are grouped and never printed, and no institution is named. The federal file does not contain the fire safety system descriptions that colleges publish in their own reports.

Conflicts: NFIRS and the college disclosures measure different things (fire department responses in all campus-type housing versus every uncontrolled burning in on-campus housing), so we show them side by side and do not reconcile them. Older national estimates by USFA (2007 to 2009) and CPSC (1998 to 2005) are cited only for historical context.

Legal notice: summaries of 20 U.S.C. 1092(i) and 34 CFR 668.49 are for reference and are not legal advice. Last updated 2026-11-01. Scripts and outputs are in the report's data files.

This report presents published data with its limitations. It is not legal, engineering, financial or investment advice. Requirements depend on the code edition your state and local fire marshal have adopted; confirm with your authority having jurisdiction.

Sources, ranked by quality

Tier 1: primary and official sources (18)

• [1] FEMA / U.S. Fire Administration. NFIRS Public Data Release 2020, Fire and Hazardous Materials files. 2020. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [2] FEMA / U.S. Fire Administration. NFIRS Public Data Release 2021, Fire and Hazardous Materials files. 2021. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [3] FEMA / U.S. Fire Administration. NFIRS Public Data Release 2022, Fire and Hazardous Materials files. 2022. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [4] FEMA / U.S. Fire Administration. NFIRS Public Data Release 2023, Fire and Hazardous Materials files. 2023. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [5] FEMA / U.S. Fire Administration. NFIRS Public Data Release 2024, Fire and Hazardous Materials files. 2024. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [6] FEMA / U.S. Fire Administration. NFIRS Public Data Release 2025, Fire and Hazardous Materials files. 2025 (released 2026-05-01; partial participation). Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [7] FEMA. FEMA/USFA NFIRS Annual Data (OpenFEMA dataset page). 1980 to 2025. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [8] U.S. Fire Administration. National Fire Incident Reporting System (program page). current. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [9] U.S. Fire Administration. NFIRS Complete Reference Guide (2015), property use codes 460, 462, 464 (in the PDR files). 2015 edition. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [10] U.S. Fire Administration. About NFIRS and Release Notes 2025; Data Quality Errata Addendum 2020 to 2025 (in the PDR files). released 2026-05-01. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [11] U.S. Fire Administration. Cause for Structure Fires (USFA cause hierarchy, in the PDR files). current. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [12] U.S. Fire Administration. NFIRS 5.0 Fire Data Analysis Guidelines and Issues. current. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [13] U.S. Department of Education, Office of Postsecondary Education. Campus Safety and Security, Custom Data: Total Fires by On-campus Student Housing Facility and Detailed Fire Data. calendar years 2020 to 2024. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [14] U.S. Department of Education, Office of Postsecondary Education. Campus Safety and Security glossary (fire, category of fire, on-campus student housing facility). current. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [15] Office of the Federal Register (eCFR). 34 CFR 668.49, Institutional fire safety policies and fire statistics. current (74 FR 55946, 2009). Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [16] Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School (statute text). 20 U.S.C. 1092(i), Disclosure of fire safety standards and measures. current. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [17] U.S. Fire Administration. Topical Fire Report Series Vol. 12 Issue 9: University Housing Fires (2007-2009). 2007 to 2009. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [18] U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. Increase in College Dorm Fires Prompts Officials to Issue Warning (news release). 1998 to 2005. Accessed 2026-11-01.

Tier 2: trade bodies, market research, company data (3)

• [19] National Fire Protection Association. NFPA 13, Standard for the Installation of Sprinkler Systems (standard page). current edition. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [20] National Fire Protection Association. NFPA 72, National Fire Alarm and Signaling Code (standard page). current edition. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [21] Fire Safety Research Institute (UL Research Institutes). National Emergency Response Information System (NERIS). current. Accessed 2026-11-01.