The exploding costs of fighting US wildfires

This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Oregonians buying nicotine pouches like Zyn and Rogue were met with a surprise at the cash register starting this year. Each tin had a new 65-cent tax on it, meant to bolster funding for the state’s wildfire reduction efforts.

Wildfires burned more than 1.9 million acres in Oregon in 2024. By the time they finally died down at the end of October, the state had spent more than $350 million fighting them, greatly exceeding the $10 million it had allocated. “By July 21, I had already completely blown through my cash on hand,” said Kyle Williams, Oregon Department of Forestry’s deputy director for fire operations.

Contractors weren’t promptly paid for services they’d already provided, from digging fuel breaks to supplying meals, and the state had to hold an emergency legislative session to allocate the money. That summer highlighted the flaws in how the state funds both firefighting and the preventive work that reduces the chances of large, destructive blazes in the first place.

This year, as drought and a devastating snowpack stack up across the West, officials are bracing for what could be a challenging fire season. The Idaho Department of Lands has roughly $38 million set aside. But Dustin Miller, Idaho director of lands, said he could spend twice that in a big year. “We’re a little bit concerned this year, because I’m not sure we’re going to have enough to cover what could be a very long and busy fire season,” he said. “The conditions are very concerning to me.”

States across the West are dealing with outdated funding systems in the face of skyrocketing wildfire costs. “Every state is grappling with this,” Williams said. “I don’t blame anybody for not having the perfect solution.” But change is coming, one expensive wildfire season at a time.

Nine of the 10 most expensive wildfires in US history have occurred since 2017. Costs are climbing for several reasons: A century of fire suppression has led to more flammable vegetation on the landscape, ready to burn; climate change is boosting the hot, dry weather that helps fuel wildfires; and developers and property owners are building yet more homes in fire-prone areas.

All this leads to larger, more destructive fires that often require costly intervention to protect people and property, such as dropping fire retardant and water from planes and helicopters. And fire suppression efforts account for just a sliver of a wildfire’s true cost — roughly 9 percent, according to a 2018 report by Headwaters Economics. Rebuilding infrastructure and rehabilitating landscapes must also be factored in.

Wildland firefighting is an inherently collaborative and complex process, both financially and logistically, thanks to the checkerboard of land ownership in the West. Wildfire costs are shared between the federal government, states, tribes, counties, and local municipalities. Where a fire starts generally determines who pays upfront to fight it; other affected entities then reimburse that party, a process that takes several years and can result in temporarily depleted funds. 

According to a 2022 Pew Charitable Trusts analysis, most states use their general fund, or revenue from state taxes and other fees, to cover their wildland firefighting costs, pitting those needs against every other state priority. States cobble together additional funding from several sources: Many have property owners pay an annual fee on forested land and structures that’s tied to wildfire risk. Utah taps federal mineral lease bonus payments, while California and Oregon tax timber sales.

Despite ballooning costs, states tend to base their wildfire funding allocations on historic averages, an approach that, according to Pew’s research, generally leads them to underestimate the actual amount needed. When that happens, some states, like Oregon, have to call for an emergency session to release more funds after the fact. While this might have worked in the past, it’s beginning to get disruptive. “The increasing frequency and expense of these events makes it less of a ‘if’ this is going to happen and more of a ‘when,’” said Peter Muller, a senior officer with Pew’s managing fiscal risks project.

Across the West, states are starting to take action by putting more money in wildfire-specific accounts ahead of fire season and, better yet, tapping new funding sources.

Montana’s Legislature, for example, greatly expanded how much money it budgeted for fires in advance in 2023, adding $152 million to a wildfire suppression special account that began with $40 million in 2008. Last year, Hawaii enacted a “green fee” charge on hotel room and short-term stays to raise money for climate resilience and future disaster response, including wildfires, offloading some financial responsibility from tax-paying residents to tourists. 

Oregon legislators, spurred by the financial mess of 2024, passed a slate of changes during the 2025 session to strengthen the state’s approach to funding both wildfire prevention and suppression, including the new nicotine pouch tax. They also raised existing taxes on timber harvest and landowner fees for building in forested areas, and established a new process for the Oregon Department of Forestry to obtain emergency loans from the State Treasury.

In addition, they allocated $150 million for a new natural disaster fund, replenishing and more than tripling an emergency wildfire fund. And the Legislature created a new account, to be filled with federal reimbursements from past fire seasons, that the Department of Forestry can access without a special session. “We’re not 100 percent there yet, but we are 100 percent further than we were in fire season ’24,” Williams said. Still, the state appropriated $25 million less in its 2025–2027 budget than fire agencies had requested for wildfire funding.

Even with these improvements, most Western states are still largely missing an important component: wildfire prevention efforts. “When you look at the investment of where funding is going, it overwhelmingly favors wildfire response and suppression,” said Kimiko Barrett, a researcher with the Alliance for Wildfire Resilience. But preventive measures can help make fires less destructive and less expensive to fight, saving money in the long run.

Ideas like Oregon’s “Zyn tax,” which was created to treat wildfire prevention as a separate cost that needs long-term, sustainable funding, are slowly gaining steam. Coupling the tax with another new revenue source — 20 percent of the interest from Oregon’s “rainy day fund” — will generate an estimated $43 million every two years for wildfire mitigation projects, such as forest thinning.

Other states are also beginning to be more proactive. Utah passed legislation in 2025 that dedicated money solely to prevention, preparedness, and mitigation. Property owners with forested land in Idaho already pay an annual fee on structures to support permanent staff and equipment, including engines and hoses, essential for prescribed burns as well as wildfires. This spring, Idaho increased the amount they can be assessed from $40/year to $100/year to better fund both fire season and year-round work.

Together, these approaches are starting to address the burgeoning costs and hard trade-offs that states and taxpayers will face in the coming years and decades. “The only way you can control those costs someday,” Oregon’s Williams said, “is by creating a landscape that’s not as expensive and not as damaging to fight fire.”