We built a 25-km record of smoke over the contiguous United States (CONUS) from MODIS MAIAC granules (MCD19A2.061) covering 2000–2025 and quantified the occurrence of wildfire smoke over this period. Smoke days over CONUS more than doubled from a mean of 3.07 per year in 2003–2013 to 6.99 in 2014–2024. The slope is +0.29 [95% CI: +0.04, +0.51] days/yr, with 48% of the record’s total smoke-day burden falling in its last five years. The smoke AOD index, which combines occurrence with optical depth, rises at 8.9%/yr. Breaking it down into frequency times intensity, 74% of the growth is smoke occurring more often with the remainder due to smoke being thicker. The increase is seasonally and spatially concentrated: 91% of it falls in July, August and September, with no detectable shift in the timing of the season. Compared against NOAA’s Hazard Mapping System heavy-smoke polygons over 2011–2024, an entirely independent product, the record agrees closely: r = 0.960 across 175 months, r = 0.946 annually, a median per-cell temporal correlation of 0.83, and a near one-to-one slope.