Guide
NERIS deadlines
Every federal deadline in the NFIRS-to-NERIS transition has passed. Here is what each one was, and what it means if your department is behind.
The short version
NFIRS is gone. It stopped accepting new incidents on January 1, 2026, closed for edits on January 31, and went offline for everyone in February. There is no longer a system to fall behind on filing into — there is only NERIS.
The federal dates
- Passed
January 1, 2026
Incident data submission became NERIS-only. No 2026 incidents go into NFIRS.
Source: USFA
- Passed
January 31, 2026
Last day to edit or correct a 2025 incident record in NFIRS.
Source: USFA
- Passed
February 2026
NFIRS became unavailable to all users. NERIS is the federal standard from here.
Source: USFA
All three are published by the U.S. Fire Administration on its NFIRS sunset page.
Onboarding was staggered, and that confused people
Departments did not all start at once. NERIS onboarding opened by FEMA region and then by state, which is why two neighboring departments in different states had different start dates and both were correct.
- FEMA Region 2 — NY, NJ, PR, USVIMay 2025
- FEMA Region 4 — AL, FL, GA, KY, MS, NC, SC, TNFrom June 1, 2025
- TexasJuly 1, 2025
- IllinoisNovember 3, 2025
These are the windows we have read on a published federal or state page. Other states ran their own schedules; we are not listing a date for a state we have not verified, because a wrong onboarding date is worse than no date. Your state fire marshal's office published yours.
If your department is behind
Being late is not the same as being locked out. What it means depends on which of these you are:
Registered, but not really filing
The most common case, and the least dramatic. Your department exists in NERIS and someone can sign in, but incidents are piling up unfiled or living in a spreadsheet. Nothing is broken; the reporting habit just has not restarted. That is a workflow problem, not an access problem.
Never registered at all
Start with your state fire marshal's office rather than the federal help desk. They handled the onboarding lists for your state and can tell you what your department's status actually is. You can also check whether you are already in the public directory with our NERIS ID lookup.
Holding 2025 records you never got into NFIRS
NFIRS closed for edits on January 31, 2026 and went offline after that, so those records cannot be filed into NFIRS now. What to do with them is a question for your state fire marshal, who sets the record-keeping expectations you are actually held to. We will not guess at that on their behalf.
What we are not telling you
We do not state whether NERIS reporting is mandatory for your department, what any penalty for late reporting is, or how reporting relates to grant eligibility. Those answers vary by state and by program, we are not the authority on any of them, and a confident wrong answer here would cost a department real money. Your state fire marshal and USFA are the sources that can actually answer them.
This page is rebuilt on every deploy, and the passed/upcoming marks are computed then. If a date above looks stale, check USFA as the authority.