NERIS 1.5 is live, and Incident Analysis is the first module built on top of the incident

On October 1, 2026, NERIS moved to Version 1.5, the first significant revision of the national schema since it became the only national system in January. The release on the API today is 1.5.1. Every change is additive: no field was removed, the API did not change shape, and a department's existing integration keeps working. What changed is what an incident can say.

Incident types split where the old ones hid things. An agricultural vehicle fire is no longer coded as a car fire. Water rescue is now three types: ice, flood, and surf. Micromobility and human-powered vehicle collisions, debris and obstruction removal, aircraft alerts, and downed power lines each have a code of their own.

The base incident gained a flag for interaction with a person experiencing homelessness. Locations gained modifiers for short-term rentals, hoarding, and excessive fuel load, plus occupancy types for data centers, mega warehouses, automated storage, greenhouses, aquatic facilities, and fitness centers. Actions and tactics grew: control utilities, rapid intervention established with its own timestamp, vehicle, structure, and trench stabilization, vehicle electrical disconnection, ground and aerial ladders, aerial master stream, and EMS support without patient care. Fire details added two damage levels, affected and inaccessible, an outside-fire ordinance violation, and investigator wording that retires the word arson.

Separately, on June 8, 2026, NERIS turned on Incident Analysis, the first of three secondary schemas. It builds on the core record with the deeper story: cause, fire spread, the fuels burning, the products involved. A single incident can open several analysis modules at once, a structure fire with a lithium-ion battery opening structure, battery, and consumer product modules together. It sits apart from the operational record on purpose: crews close the incident when the work is done, and investigators, fire marshals, or analysts add the analysis on their own timeline. Community Risk Reduction and Health and Safety follow later in 2026 on the same additive model, and NERIS says Version 2 is planned by the end of 2026.

The part worth noticing is the cadence. Between July and September, NERIS shipped five 1.4.7x releases, then 1.5.0, then 1.5.1. Codes are inserted into the middle of existing lists, new questions appear, and a code that is retired is marked deprecated with its replacement named. A records system that typed the NERIS code lists into its software has a release to ship for every one of these. A department still on paper has nothing to ship and nothing to file.