Fire is a recurrent, strongly seasonal disturbance across Sudan’s savannas, yet aggregate burned-area statistics cannot resolve long-term changes in the expansion of fire events. Here, we identified individual fire events across Sudan from August 2002 to July 2025 by grouping burned MODIS MCD64A1 pixels according to spatial and temporal connectivity criteria. For each event, we calculated the mean areal spread rate as the total burned area divided by event duration (km2 day−1). Sensitivity tests using a Global Fire Atlas reference event indicated that a 3-pixel/3-day connectivity setting balanced fragmentation and excessive merging. Retaining events lasting ≥3 days and burning ≥20 km2 yielded 13,290 events, concentrated in the southern part of Sudan. Across 23 fire seasons, total burned area declined significantly, whereas mean event area showed no significant trend. Median and 10th-percentile areal spread rates each decreased by approximately 9.4% decade−1 (p < 0.001), while the 90th-percentile trend was weaker and non-significant (p = 0.091). K-means clustering revealed two broad propagation types: a more frequent lower-expansion type and a rarer higher-expansion type with greater areal spread rates and displacement. The decline was concentrated in lower-expansion dry-season events, with no significant trends among higher-expansion events or wet-season events. These findings show that fire-event expansion in Sudan has declined selectively rather than uniformly, revealing changes that aggregate burned-area trends alone cannot capture.