Across the drought-cracked rangelands of west Texas, the tinder-dry pine forests of the Southeast, and the fire-scarred hillsides of California, the conditions for a brutal wildfire season are already in place. AccuWeather projects that up to 80,000 wildfires could ignite across the United States in 2026, potentially scorching as many as 8 million acres. The forecast, released this spring, lands at a moment when federal drought data shows roughly 61% of the contiguous U.S. locked in dry conditions, with little relief expected through summer.
If those numbers hold, 2026 would rank among the most destructive fire years on record, straining firefighting crews already stretched thin by back-to-back difficult seasons and threatening communities that sit squarely in the path of expanding wildfire risk.
A drought that won’t let go
The drought fueling this forecast is not a regional pocket of dry weather. It is a continental-scale event. For the week of April 29 to May 5, 2026, the U.S. Drought Monitor reported that 60.92% of the Lower 48 states met drought criteria, while 50.90% of the entire United States and Puerto Rico fell into drought categories. The Drought Monitor, produced jointly by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, classifies conditions on a scale from D0 (abnormally dry) through D4 (exceptional drought). When D0 conditions are folded in, the national figure climbs to roughly 62%, aligning with the number AccuWeather cited in its projection.
What makes this drought especially dangerous for fire season is its persistence. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center seasonal drought outlook shows large zones where drought is expected to continue or worsen through summer, particularly across the Southern Plains, the interior West, and portions of the Southeast. Sustained dryness drains moisture from grasses, brush, and timber, lowering the threshold for ignition and allowing fires to spread faster once they start.
Forecasters and land managers also track specialized drought tools that integrate soil moisture, snowpack levels, and short-term precipitation trends. Together, these products paint a picture of a landscape primed to burn: large stretches of the West, the Southern Plains from Oklahoma through Texas, and pine-dominated regions of the Southeast are carrying fuel-moisture deficits well below seasonal norms.
How 2026 compares to recent fire history
AccuWeather’s upper-end estimate of 8 million acres would be above average but not without precedent. Data from the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), which maintains wildfire records dating to 1983, shows that the 10-year average from 2016 through 2025 hovered near 7 million acres burned annually. Several individual years exceeded that mark significantly: 2020 saw more than 10 million acres burn, driven largely by record fires in California, Oregon, and Colorado, while 2017 topped 10 million acres as well.
The fire-count side of the projection also has historical context. The U.S. has averaged roughly 60,000 to 70,000 reported wildfires per year over the past decade, according to NIFC statistics. A season reaching 80,000 would represent a notable spike but falls within the range recorded in high-activity years. The real concern is not the raw count but how many of those fires grow large simultaneously, overwhelming suppression resources and forcing agencies to triage which communities get help first.
That triage scenario is not hypothetical. In past high-fire years, the National Multi-Agency Coordinating Group has raised preparedness levels to their highest tiers, activating military assets and international firefighting crews. Even with mutual-aid agreements and federal surge capacity, multiple large fires burning at once across several states can leave some communities waiting for resources.
Regions to watch this summer
While AccuWeather has not released detailed state-level breakdowns, the drought footprint and NIFC’s own seasonal fire-potential outlooks point to several high-risk zones.
The interior West and Northern Rockies: Montana, Idaho, and eastern Washington and Oregon face above-normal fire potential heading into July and August, according to NIFC’s Predictive Services. Snowpack in parts of the Northern Rockies came in below average this winter, meaning less meltwater to keep forests and grasslands hydrated into summer.
Southern Plains and Texas: Drought has been entrenched across western Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas for months. Grassland fires in this region can move with terrifying speed. The 2024 Smokehouse Creek Fire in the Texas Panhandle, which burned more than 1 million acres, demonstrated how quickly Plains fires can overwhelm rural communities with limited firefighting infrastructure.
The Southeast: Prolonged dry conditions in Georgia, the Carolinas, and Florida have pushed fire risk higher than usual for the region. Suburban and exurban communities in the Southeast often lack the defensible-space standards and evacuation planning common in Western fire zones, raising the stakes if large fires develop near populated areas.
California: The state’s fire season increasingly runs year-round. Drought conditions in Southern California, combined with the ever-present threat of Santa Ana winds in fall, keep the state on high alert. CAL FIRE typically ramps up staffing and pre-positions engines well before peak fire months.
What federal agencies are and aren’t saying
It is worth noting that NIFC and NOAA do not issue the kind of single-number national forecast that AccuWeather published. Federal seasonal outlooks from NIFC’s Predictive Services describe fire potential in qualitative terms (above normal, normal, below normal) for specific regions and time windows. That approach reflects the inherent uncertainty in predicting exactly how many fires will start and how large they will grow, variables that depend on wind events, lightning storms, human ignition, and the timing of monsoon moisture in the Southwest.
AccuWeather, as a private forecasting firm, uses proprietary algorithms that blend satellite data, climate models, and historical analogs to generate its projections. Those models can be accurate, but the “up to” framing in the 80,000-fire estimate signals a range, not a fixed prediction. The lower bound could be meaningfully smaller, especially if late-spring storms deliver more moisture than currently expected or if early-season suppression keeps ignitions from growing.
The drought-to-fire connection itself, however, is not in dispute. It is one of the most well-established relationships in fire science: dry fuels ignite more readily, burn hotter, and resist suppression. When drought persists through late spring and into summer, fire seasons start earlier and last longer. Federal agencies have documented this pattern across decades of records.
Smoke, health, and the costs ahead
Even for Americans who live nowhere near a fire line, a high-acreage season carries consequences. Wildfire smoke can degrade air quality across hundreds or even thousands of miles, triggering health advisories in cities far from the flames. In recent years, smoke from Western wildfires has pushed air-quality readings into unhealthy ranges as far east as New York and Washington, D.C., sending vulnerable residents, particularly children, the elderly, and people with asthma or heart disease, to emergency rooms.
No federal agency has released a cost projection tied specifically to AccuWeather’s 2026 scenario. But the financial toll of major fire seasons offers a rough guide. Federal suppression spending alone has exceeded $3 billion in several recent years, according to Congressional Research Service reports, and total economic losses from wildfires, including property damage, timber loss, agricultural disruption, and tourism impacts, run far higher. The 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California, caused an estimated $16.5 billion in damage by itself.
Health costs from smoke exposure are harder to quantify but increasingly recognized. A 2023 study published in The Lancet Planetary Health estimated that wildfire smoke contributes to tens of thousands of premature deaths annually in the United States, a figure that rises in high-fire years.
What homeowners and communities can do now
Homeowners and local officials do not need to wait for final fire-count numbers to act on the signal embedded in the drought data. Fire-preparedness steps that make sense under any of the plausible 2026 scenarios include:
- Clearing defensible space: Removing dead vegetation, trimming branches, and maintaining a buffer zone of at least 30 feet around structures, as recommended by the National Fire Protection Association and CAL FIRE’s Ready, Set, Go program.
- Hardening structures: Replacing wood-shake roofs, screening attic vents with fine mesh, and using fire-resistant building materials where possible.
- Planning evacuations: Knowing multiple routes out of your area, keeping a go-bag packed, and signing up for local emergency alerts.
- Monitoring air quality: Bookmarking AirNow.gov, the EPA’s real-time air-quality tracker, and keeping N95 masks on hand for smoke events.
The drought data is clear, the historical pattern is well established, and the seasonal outlooks point in one direction. Whether the final 2026 tally lands closer to 60,000 fires or 80,000, the conditions on the ground right now call for preparation, not complacency.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
