Climate Central Finds Surge in Billion-Dollar U.S. Wildfires

By Daniel Okafor

Billion-dollar U.S. wildfires have become more than five times as frequent and 10 times as costly over the past two decades, according to Climate Central’s analysis of the nation’s most destructive fires.

How large has the billion-dollar wildfire toll become?

Climate Central, a nonprofit climate research and communications group, counted 31 individual U.S. wildfires that each caused at least $1 billion in damage since 1980. Together, they cost nearly $186 billion, destroyed more than 79,500 structures and killed an estimated 373 people, the analysis found.

Adam Smith, the Climate Central scientist who led the project, said: “Either way you look at it, the rise in damages relates to human activities.”

From 2007 through 2026, the U.S. experienced 26 billion-dollar wildfires, compared with five during the previous 20 years. Climate Central put inflation-adjusted losses at $170 billion for the recent period, up from $15.6 billion for the earlier one.

More than three-quarters of the 31 fires have occurred since 2016, the analysis found. They include the $36.3 billion Palisades fire in Los Angeles in 2025 and the $6 billion Lahaina fire in Hawaii in 2023.

California accounts for 23 of the 31 fires and $167 billion of losses, according to Climate Central. The others struck Hawaii, Colorado, Oregon, New Mexico, Tennessee, Texas and Washington.

What is driving the higher losses?

Smith tied the surge to climate change and communities’ choices about development. He said climate change contributes to conditions that increase the likelihood that fires ignite and spread.

Smith also cited increasingly valuable real estate and rising reconstruction costs in areas where communities meet wildlands. He said those places have more to lose when fires occur.

Climate Central’s dataset tracks both event frequency and inflation-adjusted damage. The side-by-side figures show that the rise in event counts came with a much larger increase in aggregate losses.

How does the new accounting change the toll?

For decades, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) maintained the U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database. The agency tracked the nation’s costliest hurricanes, floods, droughts, wildfires and other events.

Under the earlier method, NOAA combined losses from many fires during the same wildfire season into one disaster. That total included smaller fires that did not cross the $1 billion threshold on their own.

Climate Central now counts each qualifying wildfire separately. The recalculation works like splitting one seasonal invoice into separate bills for each fire, producing a more detailed loss picture while lowering the overall wildfire price tag to about $186 billion from $221 billion under the older method.

Under Climate Central’s narrower method, the headline total does not capture every wildfire loss. It excludes the many smaller fires that fall below the individual threshold, even when those losses raise a season’s combined total.

NOAA discontinued the project in 2025. Climate Central began operating the database that October. Smith continued to helm the research after spending 15 years as the NOAA project’s lead scientist.

Climate Central’s goal was to continue the federal dataset, expand the detail available on wildfires and retain the methodology for assessing other disaster types, Smith said.

Including the newly separated wildfire events, Climate Central counts 453 billion-dollar U.S. weather and climate disasters since 1980, with total losses of $3.2 trillion.

Next year, Climate Central plans to extend the fire-by-fire ledger to individual events causing at least $100 million since 1980, giving the next dataset a finer measure of where wildfire losses concentrate.