Wildfire risk in Arizona: how to check your property exposure in 2026

Arizona counties we have analyzed

Highlighted counties have a published page built from real Satelife measurements sampled across the county itself. Select one on the map to open it — or type where you live into the box below. Satelife runs address-level reports statewide; the highlight marks where we have published the research, not where we can score.

Arizona's wildfire reality in 2026

Arizona holds two of the largest wildfires ever recorded in the American Southwest. The 2011 Wallow Fire burned 538,049 acres of the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest after two campers left a fire unattended near Alpine — still the largest in state history. The 2002 Rodeo–Chediski Fire burned 468,638 acres across Gila and Navajo counties and destroyed close to 500 homes. Behind them: the Cave Creek Complex (2005, 243,950 acres), Horseshoe Two (2011, 222,954), the Bush Fire (2020, 193,455), the Telegraph Fire (2021, 180,747), the Woodbury Fire (2019, 123,875) and the Bighorn Fire (2020, 119,541) burning down the Santa Catalinas above Tucson.

The most recent entry on that list arrived in 2025. The lightning-caused Dragon Bravo Fire burned 145,504 acres on the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park, destroyed the historic Grand Canyon Lodge, the North Rim Visitor Center and the cabin district around them, and closed the developed North Rim for the rest of the season.

And then there is Yarnell Hill. In June 2013 it burned 8,400 acres — 1.6% of the Wallow Fire — and took 129 structures and the lives of nineteen members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, the deadliest day for American wildland firefighters since 1933. Arizona's wildland fire agency is the Department of Forestry and Fire Management, which runs the state's fire response alongside the federal land managers who administer most of the ground that burns.

Sources: Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management · NIFC / WFIGS incident records · National Park Service, Dragon Bravo Fire updates · NWCG and the Yarnell Hill Fire Serious Accident Investigation Report · contemporaneous reporting on the 2002–2025 fires.

Two Arizonas, and the desert is the one that changed

Above the Mogollon Rim. The largest continuous stand of ponderosa pine anywhere in the world — roughly 2.6 million acres — runs along the Rim from the Grand Canyon's South Rim east to the New Mexico line, through Flagstaff, Payson and the White Mountains, with mixed conifer and spruce-fir above it. Wallow, Rodeo–Chediski, Dragon Bravo, the 2019 Museum Fire outside Flagstaff — the state's size records are written here, in a fire-adapted forest carrying a century of accumulated fuel.

Below it, the Sonoran Desert. This is the part that is new. Saguaro-and-palo-verde desert did not historically carry fire: there was not enough continuous fuel between the plants. Invasive buffelgrass and red brome filled that gap, and the desert now burns in a way the native vegetation has no adaptation to survive. The Bush, Telegraph, Woodbury and Cave Creek Complex fires all ran through this fuel — hundreds of thousands of acres in country that a few decades ago could not carry a running fire at all.

Between the two, the sky islands: the Santa Catalinas above Tucson, the Chiricahuas in the southeast corner, isolated forested ranges rising out of desert grassland. The Bighorn Fire burned down the Catalinas into the northern edge of Tucson in 2020; Horseshoe Two burned 222,954 acres of the Chiricahuas in 2011.

The practical consequence for a property owner is that Arizona's fire question is not answered by elevation alone. A Phoenix-fringe parcel in cured buffelgrass and a Flagstaff parcel under ponderosa are both exposed, for entirely different reasons, and the layer breakdown on a report is where that difference shows up.

What a buyer can and cannot look up in Arizona

Arizona sellers complete the Residential Seller's Property Disclosure Statement, which asks about known material facts, environmental hazards and property history. It contains no wildfire hazard designation — because, as above, the state publishes none to disclose. A buyer doing wildfire diligence on a Prescott lot, a Flagstaff parcel or a Rim Country cabin starts from what the seller happens to know.

AZ WRAP will show that buyer a modelled risk surface for the neighbourhood. What it will not show is this parcel: its slope and aspect, the fuel actually touching the structure, how many independent ways a fire engine can reach it and a household can leave, or what the mapped fire perimeters within a few miles have already done. That gap is the one an address-level report is built to close, and in a state with no zone to cite it is the whole of the evidence.