The National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) in Boise, Idaho, is the nation's support center for wildland firefighting. It is not a single agency but a shared site where federal and state fire, land management and weather agencies work together on the logistics, intelligence and decision support behind wildfires and other emergencies.
Who works there
NIFC lists the agencies currently represented as the U.S. Fire Administration, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Wildland Fire Service, the National Association of State Foresters and the National Weather Service (NWS). The center has no single director.
The U.S. Wildland Fire Service is new. In 2026 the Department of the Interior combined fire programs that had been spread across the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service and two other Interior offices into that one service.
The center itself dates to 1965, when it opened as the Boise Interagency Fire Center.
Moving crews and equipment
Inside NIFC, the National Interagency Coordination Center (NICC) is the focal point for mobilizing resources to wildland fires and other incidents across the United States. It works with ten Geographic Area Coordination Centers, each covering a region such as Alaska, the Great Basin or Southern California.
NICC also produces Predictive Services products that the fire community uses to plan incident management and decide where resources go.
Preparedness levels
The National Multi-Agency Coordination Group, made up of fire representatives from each agency at NIFC, sets a national preparedness level from 1 to 5. The level reflects fuel and weather conditions, fire activity and how available suppression resources are across the country.
At level 1, geographic areas handle their fires with local resources and little or no national support. At level 5, national resources are heavily committed and extra measures are taken to support the regions.
What the public sees, and its limits
NIFC publishes National Fire News with regular updates on fire activity and the current national preparedness level, plus annual statistics and seasonal fire potential outlooks for the next four months. During peak activity, NICC's Incident Management Situation Report gives a nationwide snapshot.
These are national summaries. Each geographic area carries its own preparedness level, which can differ from the national level, and none of it replaces local incident updates or warnings from the local NWS office.