Abstract Remote sensing analyses of boreal forest regions have found widespread decreasing or increasing trends in normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). Initially, these trends were attributed to climate change induced shifts in primary productivity. It is emerging, however, that fire disturbance and subsequent succession also strongly impact the optical properties of boreal forests. Here we use NDVI time series data from Landsat (1999–2018) paired with surveys of 102 forest stands with known recent fire history to investigate the relationship between NDVI and forest structure during succession. We found that NDVI varies systematically with stand age as a result of successional changes in forest structure and composition and that the proportion of deciduous (broad-leaved) trees in the upper canopy is a better predictor of NDVI than leaf area index. Recent fire disturbance led to strong NDVI decreases and early post-fire recovery of herbaceous and deciduous vegetation to strong NDVI increases. The mid-succession transition from deciduous to evergreen (needle-leaved) stands led to weak NDVI decreases, while mid-to-late succession thinning of evergreen canopies led to weak NDVI increases. Thus, both increasing and decreasing NDVI stands occur naturally across the landscape, and do not necessarily reflect a large-scale shift in boreal forest productivity.