UK fire statistics 2026: what the latest Home Office data shows

The Home Office publishes detailed statistics on every incident attended by fire and rescue services in England. The latest release, covering the year ending September 2025, shows fires rising, deliberate fire setting up sharply and response times lengthening for the fifth year running. This article breaks down the headline numbers, explains what sits behind them, and looks at what they mean for anyone responsible for fire safety in a building.

Primary fires rose again

Fire and rescue services in England attended 66,866 primary fires in the year ending September 2025, up from 61,085 the year before, a rise of around 9.5 per cent and the highest figure since 2022. Primary fires are the more serious incidents: fires in buildings and vehicles, fires involving casualties or rescues, and any fire attended by five or more appliances.

The five year picture, by year ending September:

• 2021: 61,610 primary fires

• 2022: 67,477 primary fires

• 2023: 62,574 primary fires

• 2024: 61,085 primary fires

• 2025: 66,866 primary fires

The latest figure works out at roughly 118 primary fires for every 100,000 people in England.

Deliberate fires jumped sharply

The most striking movement in the latest data is in deliberate fires. Services recorded 77,050 deliberate fires in the year ending September 2025, up from 55,814 the year before, a rise of around 38 per cent.

One note of caution when reading that number. The deliberate fires figure includes secondary fires, which are mostly small outdoor fires involving grass, refuse and derelict buildings. The primary fires total above does not include them, which is why the deliberate figure can be larger than the primary total. Secondary fires are strongly weather driven, so a hot, dry summer can move this number a long way in a single year. Even allowing for that, a 38 per cent rise is a big swing, and deliberate fire setting remains one of the largest single demands on fire and rescue services.

Response times have crept up for five years straight

The average response time to a dwelling fire in England reached 8 minutes 13 seconds in the year ending September 2025. On its own that sounds respectable. The trend is the concern:

• 2021: 7 minutes 45 seconds

• 2022: 7 minutes 57 seconds

• 2023: 7 minutes 59 seconds

• 2024: 8 minutes 5 seconds

• 2025: 8 minutes 13 seconds

That is 28 seconds added to the average dwelling fire response over five years, with no year in that period showing an improvement. Traffic, station locations and crewing levels all play a part. For building owners the direction of travel matters more than the number itself: detection, alarms, compartmentation and escape routes have to hold the line for slightly longer, every year, before the first appliance arrives.

Casualties at their highest in five years

Fire related fatalities and non fatal casualties in England totalled 7,096 in the year ending September 2025, up from 6,572 the year before and the highest total of the last five years. The large majority of those are injuries rather than deaths, but the rise tracks the overall increase in fires.

False alarms are falling as a share of incidents

One genuinely positive line in the data. False alarms accounted for 40.8 per cent of all incidents attended in the year ending September 2025, down from 44.1 per cent the year before and the lowest share of the last five years. False alarms tie up appliances that may be needed at real emergencies, so better alarm system maintenance and better call filtering by control rooms both feed directly into faster responses elsewhere.

What this means if you are responsible for a building

Put the threads together and the picture for duty holders is clear. Fires are up, casualties are up, and the average fire engine arrives a little later than it did five years ago. None of that changes your legal duties, but it does change the stakes: the measures inside your building carry more of the load.

The practical starting point is an up to date fire risk assessment. If yours has not been reviewed recently, or your building has changed use, occupancy or layout since it was written, it is due a fresh look. You can find accredited assessors through our fire risk assessment services directory.

If you want to see how your own fire and rescue authority compares on fires, response times and false alarms, the same Home Office data is broken down by authority on our fire statistics dashboard, covering 45 fire and rescue authorities across England.

Where the data comes from

All figures in this article come from the Home Office fire statistics data tables, which are compiled from incident records submitted by every fire and rescue service in England. Figures are shown by year ending September, which is how the Home Office publishes its quarterly updates, and the most recent period is provisional and subject to revision. The wider collection, including methodology notes, is on the GOV.UK fire statistics collection page.