NUMBER OF THE WEEK | House fires in Jacksonville

According to the nonprofit National Fire Protection Association, Thanksgiving is a big day for house fires because of all the cooking. (So maybe it’s unsurprising that Christmas and Christmas Eve are the next-most-popular days for cooking fires?) Jacksonville Fire and Rescue Department stats don’t back this up for the River City, though.

For three of the last four Thanksgivings, JFRD responded to just one house fire on Thanksgiving Day. The exception was 2022, when it responded to four.

So far in 2025, the Jacksonville Fire and Rescue Department has responded to 421 residential fires.

According to the JFRD Incidents Dashboard, which includes stats from the last five years, the city set a record for most house fires in a single day on July 4, 2025. Still, the single-day record was single digits…and that’s our Number of the Week: 9.

Over the last five years, JFRD’s records show it responded to almost 3,000 residential fires. About 25% of those were in just two ZIP codes: 452 in 32209 and 235 in 32208.

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House fires by year

JFRD’s average response time to residential fires this year is 2 minutes, 9 seconds (much faster than its average response time for all kinds of calls overall: about 6 and a half minutes).

So far this year, Tuesdays and Fridays are the most dangerous days for residential fires. Going back all five years, though, Monday is the most common weekday for a residential fire.

As for Jacksonville’s riskiest holiday for fires (besides that record-setting July Fourth)? That would be New Year’s Eve.