Research study
Garage fires: causes and losses
What federal fire data shows about why garages burn, and why that data cannot yet tell you anything about EV charging.
Written by HyreGarage Research Desk Primary-source research and data analysis
Audited by HyreGarage Research Desk Citation, computation and retrieval-date audit
The finding
About 6,600 home garage fires happen in the US each year, causing 30 deaths, 400 injuries and $457 million in property loss.
That comes from the U.S. Fire Administration’s November 2013 report on 2009–2011 fire data, the newest federal garage-fire study we could find. Electrical malfunction is the top cause (16%).
Garage fires spread beyond the building about four times as often as other house fires.
What the federal study found
The U.S. Fire Administration (USFA) counted about 6,600 home garage fires a year from 2009 to 2011. They caused about 30 deaths, 400 injuries and $457 million in property loss each year. That was about 2 percent of all home fires.
The data comes from NFIRS, the National Fire Incident Reporting System. It is the national database that fire departments report their calls to.
Three results stand out. Electrical malfunction was the top cause at 16 percent. Heat from powered equipment was the top heat source at 42 percent. And only 13 percent of garage fires stayed on the item where they started, against 58 percent of fires that started elsewhere in the home.
Garage fires were also more than four times as likely to spread beyond the building (11 percent against 3 percent). The rest of this page explains each number and what you can do about it.
What does this page claim, and what does it not?
One federal study is behind almost every number here. Its age and limits come first.
We looked for a newer USFA garage-fire report and did not find one. The same series covers other fire types with 2017–2020 data. We did not update the figures ourselves, and we did not try to query the raw NFIRS files.
The data is older than most home EV charging. NFIRS also has no field for a lithium-ion or EV-charging heat source. We checked this against USFA’s own November 2023 coding guidance. It is a real gap in the data, not a gap in our search.
A search result said a Massachusetts pilot tool found 50 lithium-ion battery fires in six months. mass.gov returned HTTP 403 when we tried to open the page, so we do not repeat that figure as fact.
NFIRS sorts fires by where they started. A kitchen fire that later burned into the garage does not count as a garage fire here, and the reverse is also true.
The report says its smoke-alarm tables are unweighted counts from the database, not scaled up to a national total. It also cannot tell whether an alarm was in the garage or elsewhere in the house.
The fire protection required between a garage and the house (the wall, the self-closing door) is its own topic. It is covered on our garage-to-house fire separation page, sourced to the International Residential Code.
Why is the newest federal garage-fire data from 2011?
Because no newer study exists that we could find. USFA published "Residential Building Garage Fires" in November 2013. It covers fires from 2009 through 2011.
The same Topical Fire Report Series has newer editions on other subjects. Home fires in general, apartment fires, fatal fires and firefighter injuries all have 2017–2020 updates. Garages do not seem to have one.
HyreGarage analysis: this matters for one reason. In 2009–2011, few Americans owned a plug-in electric vehicle, and home Level 2 chargers in garages were rare. A study built on that period cannot show whether EV charging has since become a common cause of garage fires. Those fires had barely started happening.
This is not a flaw in the report. It honestly describes garage fires as they were then, and its detail on causes, detection and spread still applies.
The problem is that nothing has replaced it in thirteen years. Someone searching "how common are EV charging garage fires" who finds this report is reading data that is older than the question.
We also checked whether NFIRS has since added a code for a lithium-ion battery or EV-charging heat source. It has not added a dedicated one.
USFA’s coding guidance, issued November 29, 2023, tells fire departments to fill in the general "Mobile Property Involved" section.
It says to "include 'electric' or 'hybrid' with the name of the model" in a free-text field, and that "a good narrative is very important."
That is advice for writing better notes, not a new category a national study could count. Until that changes, no one can put a sound national number on garage fires caused by EV charging. That is why our EV charging garage fires page reports the limit rather than a rate.
What causes a garage fire?
Electrical malfunction leads. NFIRS puts each fire into one cause group using a fixed order. Figures are from the same 2009–2011 USFA study.
| Cause | Share of garage fires |
|---|---|
| Electrical malfunction | 16.3% |
| Other unintentional, careless | 14.7% |
| Open flame | 11.2% |
| Appliances | 8.1% |
| Equipment misoperation, failure | 5.9% |
| Other equipment | 5.8% |
| Cooking | 5.2% |
| Heating | 4.7% |
| Other heat | 4.2% |
| Natural | 4.2% |
| Exposure | 3.7% |
| Smoking | 2.9% |
| Playing with heat source | 1.3% |
| Intentional | 0.8% |
USFA Topical Fire Report Series, Vol. 14 Issue 12 (Nov. 2013), Figure 3, copied directly from the source PDF, retrieved 2026-09-06. Groups follow the USFA Structure Fire Cause Hierarchy.
A fire goes into the highest group it fits, so each fire counts once even when several causes could describe it. Totals do not reach exactly 100 because of rounding and an "unknown/under investigation" remainder not listed here.
What supplies the heat? Powered equipment, in 42% of fires
Cause describes the circumstances. Heat source describes the physical thing that got hot enough to light something. NFIRS records both.
| Heat source category | Share of garage fires |
|---|---|
| Heat from powered equipment | 42.3% |
| Hot or smoldering object | 18.5% |
| Heat from open flame or smoking material | 16.9% |
| Heat spread from another fire | 8.4% |
| Chemical, natural heat source | 5.9% |
| Explosive, fireworks | 3.9% |
| Other heat source | 3.7% |
| Undetermined | 1.1% |
USFA Topical Fire Report Series, Vol. 14 Issue 12 (Nov. 2013), Figure 5, copied directly, retrieved 2026-09-06. "Heat from powered equipment" is mostly electrical wiring, lighting and power equipment.
Within it, electrical arcing alone caused 17 percent of all garage fires. That is the largest single heat source in the whole report, bigger than any other group shown here.
Garage fires grow much bigger before anyone notices
Fire spread is the clearest result in the garage fire report. It compares how far a fire travels before it is stopped, for fires that start in the garage and fires that start elsewhere in the home.
| Extent of spread | Garage-origin fires | Fires elsewhere in residence |
|---|---|---|
| Limited to object of origin | 13.4% | 57.5% |
| Limited to room of origin | 35.7% | 18.7% |
| Limited to floor/building of origin | 39.5% | 20.4% |
| Spread beyond building of origin | 11.4% | 2.7% |
The average loss per fire was $54,800 for garage fires against $14,690 for other home fires, 3.7 times higher. Deaths per 1,000 fires were lower for garage fires (3.6 against 5.5). Injuries per 1,000 fires were higher (48.8 against 28.9). USFA links the higher losses and injuries to slower detection, not to any one cause.
Why does a garage fire behave differently from a house fire?
The report gives three reasons. None of them is about what starts the fire.
Almost nothing detects it early
Few building codes require a smoke alarm in the garage. The National Association of State Fire Marshals (NASFM) advises against putting one there. Garages get too hot and too cold for a smoke alarm’s rated range, and car exhaust sets off false alarms that wear the sensor down.
The report puts it plainly: "very few garages have smoke alarms installed." Most fires are noticed only after smoke seeps into the house around the connecting door or through the shared wall.
A garage is full of fuel
Garages hold exactly what a fire needs: paint, solvents, fuel for lawn equipment, cardboard, paper and often a car. The 2013 report says garage fires "may also result in fires that cause greater damage and present greater challenges to firefighters" because of what is stored inside, whatever started the fire.
The building itself can work against firefighters
Lightweight engineered framing is common over garages because it spans wide open spaces. It can fail faster in a fire than older solid-lumber framing.
The report also flags a garage-only hazard for firefighters: an open garage door that could fall or close without warning and trap them inside.
What can you do about the detection gap?
This is not a firefighting guide. It is a short list of steps tied directly to the detection problem above.
NASFM guidance, cited in the federal report, says a garage is usually the wrong place for a home smoke alarm. The heat, cold and exhaust cause false alarms and, worse, make the alarm less sensitive over time.
Most garage fires are noticed once smoke reaches the house. So the smoke alarm on the house side of the garage door does the real work. Test it on the same schedule as every other alarm in the home.
If you want coverage inside the garage, a professional would look at heat detectors rated for a wider temperature range, or heat/CO combination devices made for unheated spaces. This is a product and code question for a licensed installer. Do not self-install a life-safety device without guidance.
The model building code requires this door to close on its own, for exactly the slow-detection reason shown here. Our fire separation code page covers the rule. Propping the door open removes the one barrier slowing smoke and fire on their way to the part of the house where an alarm is likely to be.
The report ties how bad a garage fire gets partly to what is stored there. Keep flammable liquids in approved, sealed containers away from heat and flame. Do not overload circuits. That addresses the two top causes, electrical malfunction and open flame, with no special skill.
Why EV charging is missing from the cause table
At first glance, the cause table suggests EV charging is not a real garage fire risk, because it is not listed. That conclusion does not follow.
The report has no EV-charging line because its data is older than the question. The coding system behind it still has no field for one, as shown above. A missing category is not a missing risk. It means the tool was not built to measure this, which is a much weaker claim.
HyreGarage analysis: what we can say, from separate sources, is this. NFPA (the National Fire Protection Association) has said that current data systems do not yet measure how often EVs catch fire across the United States.
NFPA has also said there is no current evidence that EVs are more likely to catch fire than gasoline vehicles.
Both statements fit with one plain conclusion: the garage-specific question is still open. We do not settle it either way.
Our EV and lithium battery charging page covers what the evidence does and does not support.
What we could not find, and so did not write
Garage-fire data newer than 2011. We searched USFA’s report catalog for a garage-fire update and found none. We did not build our own newer estimate from raw NFIRS files. That is a much bigger job than this page, and it could add our own method errors to a federal statistic.
A verified Massachusetts lithium-ion battery fire count. A search result said a state pilot tool found 50 such fires in six months. mass.gov returned HTTP 403 when we tried to open it on the retrieval date. We do not publish a number from a source we could not open ourselves.
A breakdown by state or by the markets HyreGarage covers. The USFA report is national. We found no state-by-state breakdown of garage-fire causes. Nothing here supports a claim about Texas, Florida, Arizona or any other single state.
A current national count of garage fires from EV charging. As shown above, NFIRS cannot produce this as a clean field today. Before you trust any number for this category, check how it was coded. It may not compare to the cause figures on this page.
One thing we chose not to do: stretch the 2009–2011 cause shares forward to guess at a 2026 figure.
The top causes then (electrical malfunction, carelessness, open flame) come from how garages are built and used, and may not change much.
But showing a thirteen-year-old percentage as current, without saying so, is the very problem this page exists to flag.
Questions
How many garage fires happen in the US each year?
What is the leading cause of garage fires?
Do garage fires spread farther than other house fires?
Should I put a smoke alarm in my garage?
What catches fire first in most garage fires?
Are EV charging fires a growing share of garage fires?
Why is there no newer national report on garage fires?
Are garage fires more deadly than other house fires?
What share of garage fires had a working smoke alarm?
Does NFIRS track lithium-ion battery fires separately?
Written and audited by
HyreGarage Research Desk
Primary-source research, data analysis and fact checking
We are not a garage door company. We read the agency file, the code record, the standards document or the public register ourselves, compute the figure from it, and publish it with the source and the date we retrieved it.
Where a number cannot be traced to a primary source, we publish the shorter page and say what we could not verify. Our own company records cover ten states; nothing national is ever derived from them.
- 10
- states our own company records cover — and the limit of any claim made from them
- 3,901
- garage door companies in the store
- 457
- license records verified against a state board
- 0
- national claims made from a ten-state store
How this desk works
- Primary sources only. Injury counts come from CPSC. Housing counts come from the Census file, not from a summary of it. Code history comes from the building commission that adopted the code. We do not cite an article that cites a source; we retrieve the source and do the arithmetic ourselves.
- Every figure carries its retrieval date. Registers change, datasets are revised and codes are amended. A number without the date it was read cannot be checked, so every study states one.
- Fact, calculation and analysis are labeled apart. A quote is a quote, a HyreGarage computation says so, and an interpretation says “HyreGarage analysis”. Presenting our reading of a dataset as something the agency stated would be the easiest way to lose the only thing this desk is for.
- Limitations go above the fold. If a figure is an upper bound, a bracket, or an association rather than a cause, that is said before the figure is quoted rather than in a footnote underneath it.
- No DIY instructions for spring, cable or track work. Those components hold enough stored energy to cause serious injury, and CPSC records the consequences. We describe what has failed and what a competent repair involves; we do not tell you how to do it.
Data as of USFA Topical Fire Report, Residential Building Garage Fires (2009-2011), retrieved 2026-09-06. Authorship on this site is organizational: the analysis belongs to the desk rather than to a named individual, and we do not publish credentials we do not hold.
Our editorial policy sets out how we source, date and correct what we publish.
Sources & retrieval dates
Worried about wiring or storage in your garage?
Electrical malfunction is the top cause in the federal data above. Have the garage wiring and outlets inspected as part of any electrical or garage remodeling work.
HyreGarage is not a garage door company or a fire safety authority, and does not perform, supervise or warrant garage door, electrical or fire-detection work. This page reports published federal fire statistics. It is not a fire-risk assessment of any home and does not replace a licensed electrician, fire-alarm technician or your local fire marshal.