Florida · NERIS

Filing NERIS reports in Florida

Florida's fire departments aren't mostly one thing. Career, volunteer, and combination crews each make up a real share of the roster, and NERIS asks the same questions of all three.

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Fire departments in Florida

Departments in the directory: 495
Volunteer departments: 35%
Volunteer or combination: 56%
Stations: 2,536

Across the 445 Florida departments that report staffing, the directory holds 4,131 volunteer firefighters and 33,439 career firefighters; 11% of those counted are volunteers.

Source: the NERIS public department directory, as mirrored in our departments table on July 28, 2026. Percentages are stated against the number of departments that actually reported the field, which is always shown next to them. Departments that reported nothing are not counted as zero and no figure here is estimated.

Three groups, not one, and no majority among them

Florida’s fire departments split three ways, and none of the three is a majority. Of the 448 departments that report a type, 198 are career, 155 are volunteer, and 95 are combination. The largest single group is career, but it accounts for less than half the total. Add the volunteer and combination departments together and they outnumber the career-only group, at 56% of the 448 typed departments. A department here is about as likely to be a volunteer company as a career-only house, with combination outfits filling in the rest.

Staffing tells a sharper story than department count does. Across the 445 departments that report staffing, the directory holds 33,439 career firefighters against 4,131 volunteers. The count runs better than eight career firefighters for every volunteer, a wider gap than the roughly even department-type split would suggest on its own. Florida has a real population of volunteer and combination departments; the people actually staffing its calls, in raw numbers, skew hard toward a paycheck.

What that split means at the station level

439 Florida departments reported a station count, adding up to 2,536 stations between them, close to 5.8 for every department that answered. Some of those stations run on a career shift schedule with someone on duty around the clock; others are a single volunteer bay with an officer who has a day job elsewhere. NERIS doesn’t ask a different set of questions depending on which kind of station the report is coming from, and neither does the review form waiting after the call — the shift-covered station and the one-bay volunteer house both end up filling in the same modules, on their own time either way.

Trying it on one call

None of the above has to be settled before you find out what this looks like in practice. Record a real incident the way you’d tell it to the next crew coming on, read back what came out of it, and see whether it gets you closer to a filed report than starting from a blank form would have. That’s the only thing the trial asks you to do.

Worth knowing about Florida

Florida has 495 fire departments in the NERIS public directory. Of the 448 that report a department type, 198 are career, 155 are volunteer, and 95 are combination — the largest single category, career, still falls short of half the total.
Source: snapshot: FL.department_count, FL.by_department_type, FL.departments_with_type_data
155 of those 448 typed departments are volunteer outright and 95 more are combination — together 56% run on volunteer staffing in some form, edging out the 198 that are career-only.
Source: snapshot: FL.by_department_type, FL.departments_with_type_data
Across the 445 Florida departments that report staffing, the directory counts 33,439 career firefighters against 4,131 volunteers — the career count runs more than eight times the volunteer count, a steeper tilt than the roughly even department-type split alone would predict.
Source: snapshot: FL.firefighters_career_sum, FL.firefighters_volunteer_sum, FL.departments_with_staffing_data
2,536 stations are reported across 439 Florida departments — close to 5.8 stations for every department that answered, well above one firehouse per department.
Source: snapshot: FL.station_count_sum, FL.departments_with_station_data

What changed

NERIS replaced NFIRS as the federal fire incident reporting standard onFebruary 1, 2026. It is a different shape of report, not a renamed one: modules instead of flat forms, a three-level text hierarchy instead of numeric incident codes, and an API instead of a file you upload.

What actually changed, in detail · NERIS onboarding (FSRI) · Department sign-up

About grant applications

An AFG application asks a department to describe its calls, its staffing, and how it operates — the kind of detail that comes straight out of incident reports when those reports exist and are current. Whether NERIS reporting itself factors into AFG eligibility or scoring is a separate question, and it isn't one this page is equipped to answer: that sits in the program's own funding notice, not in anything a records vendor has reviewed. Filed reports make the application easier to fill out regardless of how that separate question resolves.

We are a vendor, not a grant advisor. Do not take our word for what any grant program requires. Read the current notice of funding opportunity or ask your state's grant coordinator.

Try it on a real Florida call

Record one incident, read the report it produces, and decide from there. No account, no card, no call with anyone.

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FireMic is a private company. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or recommended by any Florida state agency, USFA, FSRI, or FEMA. State fire officials do not endorse vendors, and nothing on this page should be read as suggesting otherwise.

Department figures: FireMic Supabase departments table (mirror of the NERIS public department directory, ArcGIS layer 0). Snapshot taken July 28, 2026.