2026 wildfire trends: What key stakeholders need to know

Wildfire activity across the United States has continued to intensify, creating an evolving legal and regulatory landscape for utilities, insurers, municipalities, and industrial operators alike.

The January 2025 fires in the greater Los Angeles area were the costliest wildfire events on record, generating an estimated $40 billion in insured losses. The trend has continued this year: By April 10, 2026, year-to-date acreage burned stood at 1,707,778 acres, or 231 percent of the ten-year average.

The first half of 2026 has demonstrated that wildfire risk is no longer confined to the West Coast. In March 2026, the Morrill Fire became the largest fire in Nebraska’s recorded history, triggering broader wildfire activity across the central plains states.

In April, two major wildfires in southern Georgia together burned more than 50,000 acres and destroyed more than 120 homes – the most lost to wildfire in Georgia’s history. These developments unfolded against the backdrop of increasingly elongated wildfire seasons.

In the western US, peak wildfire conditions now routinely span from late spring through October, while central plains and southeastern states – once considered lower risk – are experiencing critical fire conditions earlier in the year and later into the fall.

These increased risks have demanded updated regulatory frameworks. Across the western and central US, states have enacted or expanded wildfire mitigation and preparedness regimes, particularly for electric utilities.

Since 2019, a growing number of states have adopted statutes requiring utilities to prepare and implement wildfire mitigation plans subject to public-utility commission oversight, tying regulatory approval of mitigation plans to standards of care, evidentiary presumptions, and, notably, how utilities and other regulated entities prepare for and operate during declared or forecasted wildfire seasons.

At the same time, courts have tested the boundaries of existing liability doctrines. In December 2025, the Texas Attorney General sued Xcel Energy over the 2024 Smokehouse Creek Fire, the largest wildfire in Texas history, alleging the utility failed to replace aging infrastructure and maintain safe equipment despite extreme fire weather warnings. This suit signaled a trend toward state enforcement actions in addition to private litigation. Such theories resemble an expanding accountability model seen in Western wildfire litigation.

Regulatory and legislative developments

Federal and state regulators continue to expand legal frameworks concerning wildfire risk, with growing emphasis on prevention and preparedness and a shift away from post-disaster recovery measures. Simultaneously, California’s recent legislation, by contrast, has emphasized insurance and recovery focused reforms.

Federal agency activity

At the federal level, recent executive action has pursued a sweeping restructuring of wildfire management. In 2025, Executive Order (EO) 14225, “Presidential Actions Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production,” directed enhanced forest management to reduce wildfire fuel loads, while EO 14308, “Empowering Commonsense Wildfire Prevention and Response,” directed federal agencies to improve wildfire prevention and response through data, technology, prescribed fires, and minimization of ignition risks from the bulk power system. Moreover, the fiscal year 2026 budget proposes legislation to establish a new US Wildland Fire Service within the Department of the Interior, which would consolidate federal wildfire functions.

State-level regulatory reform

While the prevailing trend across states has been toward wildfire prevention and mitigation, California has moved in a distinctive direction following the January 2025 Los Angeles fires, enacting a series of laws focused primarily on insurance coverage and post-disaster recovery.

Among the laws effective January 1, 2026: Senate Bill (SB) 495 requires insurers to pay 60 percent of contents coverage limits, capped at $350,000, to total-loss wildfire survivors without a detailed inventory; SB 547 prohibits non-renewals for commercial policies for one year following a declared disaster; and Assembly Bill (AB) 226 authorizes the FAIR Plan to access catastrophe bonds with the Insurance Commissioner’s approval. The SB 254 study report, published April 7, 2026, presents a comprehensive menu of policy options, including reforming utility liability, strengthening the California Wildfire Fund, and creating a “fast pay” facility for survivors of utility-caused wildfires.

Other states have taken a variety of approaches to wildfire resilience. Colorado adopted its first statewide Wildfire Resiliency Code on July 1, 2025, establishing minimum codes and standards for structure hardening and defensible space in the wildland-urban interface (WUI). Local jurisdictions must adopt these standards by April 1, 2026, with mandatory enforcement beginning July 1, 2026.

Nevada’s AB 376, effective January 1, 2026, allows insurers to exclude wildfire coverage from homeowner policies and offer wildfire coverage through standalone policies instead – an approach intended to help keep insurers operating in the state.

Utah has pursued both funding and regulatory measures: HB 307 created the Utah Wildfire Fund with dedicated ongoing funding for prevention, preparedness, mitigation, and suppression, and HB 48 requires insurers to provide facts supporting cancellation decisions and mandates county adoption of WUI-specific building codes. Hawaii has likewise adopted a utility-focused wildfire framework: Act 258 directs the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission to develop rules establishing an aggregate limit on liability for economic damages from covered catastrophic wildfires and to conduct studies relating to wildfire recovery funds.

Litigation trends and outcomes

Wildfire litigation has undergone a marked shift from event specific fault finding to systemic scrutiny of preparedness, planning, and governance. Plaintiffs have increasingly framed liability around what entities knew – or should have known – about wildfire risk and whether they implemented reasonable mitigation measures before a fire occurred.

Courts have correspondingly focused less on ignition mechanics alone and more on pre event decisions, documentation, and compliance with evolving regulatory standards, often treating those standards as benchmarks for reasonableness. For many defendants, these litigation disputes have arisen during ongoing investigations or active revision of mitigation plans, which has compressed timelines and complicated both litigation strategy and regulatory engagement.

Recent wildfire cases highlight several recurring areas of focus

Notably, many of these claims have turned on decisions made weeks or months before ignition, often during the run up to peak wildfire season – when red-flag warnings, mitigation protocols, and system-hardening choices are most heavily scrutinized.

• Utility liability and inverse condemnation: Claims against utilities have continued to test negligence and strict liability theories, which are frequently paired with inverse condemnation arguments. This pattern is reflected in James v. PacifiCorp, where plaintiffs pleaded inverse condemnation alongside negligence, trespass, and nuisance claims arising from allegations centering on failure to de-energize lines during severe wind conditions. Additionally, in the Eaton Fire litigation, Gursey v. Southern California Edison includes inverse condemnation among the claims alleging that Edison’s equipment ignited the fire and that the utility failed to take reasonable precautions in extreme fire-weather conditions.
  
  
• Insurance coverage and claims handling disputes: Post fire litigation has placed heightened scrutiny on coverage adequacy, treatment of smoke damage, inventory and documentation requirements, and claims payment timelines. In the Maui wildfire litigation, the resulting appeals of those disputes have focused acutely on insurer subrogation and whether victims must be made whole before carriers may recover from the global settlement fund.
  
  
• Government and municipal liability: Plaintiffs have increasingly named public entities based on land use decisions, infrastructure maintenance, emergency response, and post fire remediation efforts, testing the scope of governmental immunity and public entity accountability in the wildfire context. The coordinated Maui wildfire litigation provides a prominent example: Plaintiffs sued Maui County and the State of Hawaii alongside utility and private defendants, alleging failures in emergency response, land management, and related public-safety measures in connection with the Lahaina fires.
  
  
• Toxic tort and environmental exposure claims: Wildfire litigation has increasingly included allegations of smoke infiltration, hazardous material release, environmental contamination, and related health impacts, creating layered disputes that complicate causation and damages analysis. Sokol Blosser, et al. v. PacifiCorp illustrates the point: Winery and vineyard owners alleged that wildfire smoke from the 2020 Labor Day fires tainted grapes and rendered their wine unsellable, turning smoke exposure itself – not direct flame damage – into the central injury theory.

Courts have also increasingly scrutinized wildfire class certification. In April 2026, the Oregon Court of Appeals reversed and remanded the class liability verdict in James v. PacifiCorp, holding that the trial court erred in consolidating claims from four geographically distinct fires under a single causation instruction, where the instruction improperly assumed the evidence presented applied to all class members. This is currently under review in the Oregon Supreme Court from a petition filed by plaintiffs on May 13, 2026.

The reversal – which paused more than 160 scheduled damages trials – illustrates potential judicial skepticism toward multi-fire class proceedings and signals that predominance and typicality under Rule 23 are likely to remain significant barriers where fire behavior, property damage, and exposure vary across plaintiffs.

Together, these developments reflect a litigation environment in which wildfire exposure is assessed through several lenses, including liability, preparedness, governance, and risk allocation. Outcomes have increasingly turned on whether risk was reasonably identified, managed, and documented well before ignition.

Looking ahead

Several developments warrant close attention throughout the remainder of 2026. On the litigation front, PacifiCorp has indicated it will appeal the James reversal to the Oregon Supreme Court, and the Eaton Fire bellwether trials in January 2027 will test inverse condemnation liability valuation in consolidated wildfire proceedings.

The Texas Attorney General’s case against Xcel Energy will be an early test of state enforcement actions as a complement to private litigation. On the regulatory front, multiple states continue to advance wildfire legislation, while the proposed creation of the US Wildland Fire Service signals potential ongoing federal restructuring of wildfire governance.

For stakeholders across sectors, these developments underscore the importance of proactive, documented risk management across legal, regulatory, insurance, and operational functions. These issues are likely to be most acute during the 2026 wildfire season, as courts, regulators, and insurers assess not only past conduct, but also how entities respond to known risks in real time.

DLA Piper’s Environmental and Catastrophic Events team helps clients anticipate, manage, and respond to emerging risks driven by wildfires, environmental events, and evolving enforcement priorities. Our multi-disciplinary teams advise on regulatory compliance, inspections and enforcement actions, internal investigations, and follow-on litigation arising from environmental hazards. For more information, please contact one of the authors.