Heat release rates of typical items in fires are needed as a prerequisite for estimating fire growth and temperatures in structural fires. That is, these burning rates, in terms of heat release rate vs time, are required to be specified by the user as input to single-room and multiroom structural fire computer codes such as CFAST, FASTLite, FPETool, and HAZARD. Data are given that permit burning items to be specified in a useful modeled way, taking a t 2 fire for the growth and decay periods, with a constant maximum heat release rate between these two periods. By the use of the given data, a user of a fire simulation program can simply and easily specify the initial fire of a typical burning item, rather than having to appeal to the original experimental data. In this way, the user does not need to search for and incorporate a complicated set of numbers into the fire simulation program.