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.
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 (FIRE → STRUCTURE_FIRE → ROOM_AND_CONTENTS_FIRE) 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.
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 now exists: before any software can file on a department's behalf, someone with the Admin role in that department's NERIS account has to enroll the vendor's Client ID under Account → Enrollments. It takes a couple of minutes and it is the department, not the vendor, who grants and can revoke it.
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 NERIS asks of you
- Incident types, three levels deep. Every type in the hierarchy is searchable in our free incident type lookup, with the exact string the API expects.
- Fields grouped into modules. What each one is actually asking for, in plain language, is in the field reference.
- Unit-level responses. Each apparatus that responded gets its own entry with its own timestamps.
- Two narratives. An impediment narrative and an outcome narrative, separately.
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.