��������������������� 23 ����������������� CHARACTERISTICS OF FIRE SPREAD BASED ON THE FIRE STATISTICS MATERIAL National trends of the fire spread and the analysis of fire spread cases and burnout floor area in Government-decreed citie���������������������� �� �� Ikumi MATSUURA About 60,000 fires occur per year in Japan. Of them, over 30,000 cases were building fires. And burnout floor area is about 1,500,000 m 2 per year. It is preferable to decrease the number and scale of fires. The purpose of this study is to analyze the behavior of fire and its spread. To analyze them, we used fire statistics which is available to the public. At the beginning, the object region was the whole of Japan. The second object is Government-decreed cities and Tokyo�s 23 wards. We analyzed the rate which is the fire spread and non-fire spread. Next the research was the correlation between the burnout floor area of the fire origin building and the burnout floor area of buildings damaged by fire spread. The result shows that the Fire spreading is not a special thing as the side of the month. The burnout floor area increases as the number of burnt buildings increases. It is different from each region that the calculation guidelines about burnout floor area. There is poor correlation between the burnout floor area of the origin building and the burnout floor area of damaged buildings.