Fire Incidents in My Area
The Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service’s own figures for your town’s station area and your council area: incidents, primary fires, wildfires and false alarms, with the ten-year picture for Northern Ireland and what it means for your fire detection.
What the fire service attends where you are
Choose a town or a council area to see its figures. The Northern Ireland picture is below.
Northern Ireland, the ten-year picture
The Service's own headline figures by financial year, from its annual reports.
Incidents attended
Primary fires
False alarms from alarm systems
Accidental dwelling fires
Everything crews were mobilised to, 1 August 2024 to 31 July 2025
26,713 incidents in all. False alarms from alarm apparatus outnumber every fire category put together.
Annual figures: NIFRS Annual Reports and Statements of Accounts 2015/16 to 2024/25 (2024/25 report). Category split: NIFRS FOI 84-25-26. Rescue figures are not charted because the Service restated its method in 2018/19.
Where these figures come from
Every figure on this page comes from the Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service. We do not hold fire incident data and we do not estimate it. The figures are the Service’s own, taken from its annual reports laid before the Northern Ireland Assembly and from the responses it publishes to Freedom of Information requests, and each panel links to the document it came from. Northern Ireland has one fire and rescue service covering the whole region, working from 66 station areas. There is no published fire incident dataset for Northern Ireland on any open data portal and the Service does not publish a regular statistical bulletin, so local figures exist only where somebody has asked for them, which is why some measures are available for one year and others for ten.
The Service records every incident its crews are mobilised to, then groups them in its own words. Primary fires, which it also calls major fires, are the serious ones: a fire in a building or a vehicle, or one where anyone is hurt or rescued, or one attended by five or more appliances. Secondary fires are smaller outdoor fires with no casualties and no property involved, such as grass, gorse, refuse and bins; they follow the weather, which is why they move so much from year to year. Chimney fires are counted on their own. False alarms are counted in three groups: due to apparatus, where a detection or alarm system operated with no fire; good intent, where someone called believing there was a fire; and malicious. Special service calls are the non-fire work: collisions, flooding, animal rescues, lift releases and chemical incidents.
Read the figures fairly. A station’s turnout area is drawn for getting appliances to incidents quickly and does not follow council, ward or town boundaries, so where we show a town we show the station area of that name, the closest published match rather than an exact fit. The periods are not all the same: some tables run from 1 April to 31 March, some are calendar years and some are rolling twelve-month periods, so we print the exact period under every figure and you should not compare two figures without checking that the periods match. Not every incident can be placed on a map. The Service restated its historical figures after it set up a central data analysis team in 2018; for most measures the change is under two per cent, but for rescues it is large, so we do not show a rescue trend. Deaths and injuries are small numbers that swing from year to year, so we show them only for Northern Ireland as a whole. Figures retrieved 16 October 2026.
What this means for your fire detection
In the twelve months to 31 July 2025 the Service was mobilised to 10,133 false alarms caused by alarm apparatus, more than every category of fire put together. Most of those calls come from systems that were poorly specified, badly sited or not maintained: detectors in kitchens and shower rooms, dust from building work, heads past their service life, and systems left to signal the receiving centre without a filtering delay. Each one takes a crew off the road and, repeated, costs a business its relationship with the Service.
The answer is a system designed for the building and looked after: the right detector type in each room, cause-and-effect programming that gives staff a short window to investigate a signal before it goes out, six-monthly servicing and a weekly test. Our Engineers, subcontractors and Fire Risk Assessors are highly experienced, thoroughly understanding commercial and residential fire detection and alarm requirements. If you want the figures for your own premises, our security requirements finder shows what level of fire detection is typical for a building like yours, and a fire risk assessment and a free survey confirm it.
Fire incidents, your questions
Does Advanced Overwatch hold fire incident data for my area?
No. Every figure on this page is the Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service’s own, published in its annual reports and in its responses to information requests. We collect none of it and we estimate none of it, and each panel links to the document it came from.
How many incidents does the fire service attend in Northern Ireland?
Crews were mobilised to 24,068 emergency incidents in the year to 31 March 2025, up from 23,156 the year before, and the Regional Control Centre handled 37,207 emergency calls. Over the last decade the figure has stayed between about 22,200 and 24,600 a year.
What counts as a primary fire, and what counts as a secondary fire?
A primary fire, which the Service also calls a major fire, is one in a building or a vehicle, or any fire where somebody is hurt or rescued, or where five or more appliances attend. A secondary fire is a smaller outdoor fire with no casualties and no property involved, such as grass, gorse, refuse or a wheelie bin. There were 2,379 primary fires in Northern Ireland in 2024/25 against 3,642 secondary fires, and secondary fires swing far more from year to year because they follow the weather.
What is a false alarm, and how many are there?
A false alarm is a mobilisation where there was no fire. The Service counts three kinds: due to apparatus, where a detection or alarm system operated with no fire; good intent, where someone called in good faith; and malicious, where the caller knew there was no fire. In the twelve months to 31 July 2025 there were 10,133 apparatus false alarms, 2,576 good intent and 283 malicious, together about half of the 26,713 incidents crews were mobilised to. Apparatus false alarms alone outnumbered all fire incidents, which totalled 7,782.
Which council area has the most fire incidents?
Belfast, with 1,849 mobilised fire incidents in the twelve months to 31 July 2025, followed by Newry, Mourne and Down with 957 and Derry City and Strabane with 769. Lisburn and Castlereagh had the fewest at 354. These are counts, so the larger population areas appear higher; the per-1,000 figure in each council panel corrects for that. A further 133 incidents could not be assigned to a council area.
Why can I see figures for some years but not others, and why not for my town exactly?
Because there is no published fire statistics series for Northern Ireland. The Service’s annual reports give Northern Ireland totals for ten years, but area figures are published only when somebody asks for them under the Freedom of Information Act, so the periods vary and some measures exist for one year only. Area figures are given by station area rather than by town: a station’s turnout area is drawn for reaching incidents quickly and does not follow town or council boundaries, so where we show a town we show the station area of that name, the closest published match rather than an exact fit.
Fewer false alarms, better protection
Based in Coleraine, we design, install and maintain fire detection for homes and businesses across Northern Ireland, and we survey free of charge.
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