Guide
What is NERIS?
NERIS — the National Emergency Response Information System — is the federal incident reporting platform for US fire departments. It is developed by the U.S. Fire Administration with the Fire Safety Research Institute (part of UL Research Institutes) and DHS Science & Technology, and it replaced NFIRS as the national standard on February 1, 2026. If your department documented calls in NFIRS, NERIS is where that documentation happens now.
Where this stands today
This is not upcoming. NFIRS stopped accepting incidents on January 1, 2026, closed for corrections on January 31, and went offline in February. Departments have been filing into NERIS ever since. If yours is behind, that is a common place to be and a solvable one — the deadlines page covers what each date meant and what to do now.
What changed, in one paragraph
NFIRS was a set of flat forms with numeric codes, usually exported to the state in a file. NERIS is a cloud platform with an API: an incident is a core record with modules attached — dispatch, unit responses, casualties, a fire module when there was fire, a medical module when there was a patient. Incident types are a three-level text hierarchy instead of a memorized number, and the narrative is split into what got in your way and how it turned out. The full structural rundown is in our free NFIRS → NERIS explainer.
One real call, all the way through
The fastest way to understand NERIS is to watch a call you have already run turn into a record. Kitchen fire, second floor, contained to the room. Here is what you would say at the kitchen table, and what NERIS stores for each piece of it.
“Engine 2 was dispatched to a kitchen fire at 14 Maple, second floor.”
The incident type, three levels deep
FIRE||STRUCTURE_FIRE||ROOM_AND_CONTENTS_FIRE
NERIS wants the whole path, not just "fire". Fire → Structure Fire → Room and Contents Fire.
“We got the call at 22:14, toned out 22:15, first due on scene 22:21.”
Separate dispatch timestamps, in UTC
dispatch_time_call_arrival · dispatch_time_call_answering · dispatch_time_call_create
Each is its own field. The times a CAD system already knows are the times NERIS asks for.
“Engine 2 and Ladder 1 went, Engine 2 came back available at 23:40.”
One response record per apparatus
dispatch_unit_response[]
Units are not one text box. Each apparatus carries its own timestamps, so the platform can compute real response times.
“Lights and siren.”
Response mode
EMERGENT | NON_EMERGENT
A fixed choice, not free text.
“It was a house.”
Location use, validated as a pair
RESIDENTIAL||…
The two levels are validated together as one combined value, so only the exact defined pairs are accepted.
“The hydrant on the corner was buried and we lost a few minutes.”
The impediment narrative
incident_narrative_impediment
This is its own field. What got in your way is asked for separately, on purpose.
“Knocked down, contained to the kitchen, nobody hurt.”
The outcome narrative, plus the fire module
incident_narrative_outcome + fire
Two narratives, not one. The fire module only exists because there was a fire.
“Squad from the next town covered our second call.”
Aid, with a direction and a type
GIVEN | RECEIVED × 3 types
Mutual aid is structured. Who helped whom, and in what capacity.
Every code string above is read straight from the same table the app validates against before it files, so this page cannot drift from the incident type lookup.
Five things that trip people up
A short code is not an unfinished code
Not every incident type goes three levels deep. Some stop at two and a few are a single value. Those are complete types, not ones you failed to fill in. This is the single most common thing people second-guess.
One incident can carry several types
A car into a pole with a patient and a wire down is genuinely a few things at once. NERIS lets you record all of them and mark one primary, instead of forcing you to pick the least wrong one like NFIRS did.
A rejected report is almost always one bad value
NERIS checks values against fixed tables. When a submission bounces it is usually a single field holding something not in the table — a near-miss spelling, or an old NFIRS-era code — not a broken report. Go looking for one value, not a structural mistake.
Cancelled and no-emergency calls still get filed
There is a whole top-level category for calls that turned out not to be emergencies. A cancelled response is a real incident with a real type, not a call you skip.
The narrative split is not a formatting preference
Impediment and outcome are two separate fields. Writing one long story into the outcome box and leaving impediment blank loses exactly the information the split was created to capture.
The words people use around it
- NERIS ID
- The permanent id of a department — ten characters, like FD34003584. It identifies your department on everything it files. Look yours up →
- Module
- A section of the record that only applies to some calls. The fire module exists when there was a fire; the medical module when there was a patient. Dispatch and the core incident are always there. What each field asks →
- L1 / L2 / L3
- The three levels of an incident type — category, group, specific type. 7 categories, 22 groups, 128 types in total. Search all of them →
- PSAP
- The 911 call centre that took the call. NERIS records which one, because that is where the first timestamps come from.
- Special modifier
- A flag for the calls that are not routine — Mass Casualty Incident, Active Assailant, declared disasters. Set on top of the incident type, not instead of it.
How a report actually gets filed
Two ways. A department can work directly in the NERIS portal at neris.fsri.org, or it can file through software that talks to the NERIS API. The API route is why vendor authorization exists: before any software can file on a department's behalf, someone with the Admin role in that department's NERIS account enrolls the vendor's Client ID under Account → Enrollments. It takes a couple of minutes, and it is the department, not the vendor, who grants it and can revoke it. The exact steps, with screenshots, are three clicks long, and the API guide covers what to ask a vendor who says they integrate.
That is also how FireMic files: you talk through the call, review the filled-in report, and it goes to NERIS through the official federal API — not a CSV upload, and nothing is sent without you looking at it first.
What this page will not tell you
Whether NERIS reporting is mandatory for your department, what happens if you are late, and how any of it relates to grant eligibility. Those vary by state and by program, we are not the authority on any of them, and a confident wrong answer would cost a department real money. Your state fire marshal's office and USFA can answer them; we would rather send you there than guess.
The official sources
For anything authoritative — deadlines, policy, your state's stance — go to the source, not to a vendor. Including us.
FireMic is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of USFA, FSRI, FEMA, or any other government agency. More NERIS questions are answered in the NERIS FAQ, and your state's numbers are on the state pages.