Georgia · NERIS

NERIS reporting in Georgia

Georgia's fire departments split close to three ways among volunteer, combination, and career, but the people staffing them don't split the same way at all. NERIS doesn't care which model your department runs; the reporting module list is the same regardless.

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Fire departments in Georgia

Departments in the directory: 519
Volunteer departments: 42%
Volunteer or combination: 75%
Stations: 1,799

Across the 399 Georgia departments that report staffing, the directory holds 7,361 volunteer firefighters and 15,893 career firefighters; 32% 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.

No single model runs the state

Georgia’s directory lists 519 fire departments. Among the 390 that report a department type, the split isn’t dominated by one model the way it is almost everywhere else in this dataset: 165 are volunteer, 129 are combination, and 96 are career: a rough 42/33/25 split, not a state where volunteers or career staff make up nine in ten departments. Add volunteer and combination together and three in four Georgia departments that answered the question run on at least some unpaid staff, but a quarter of them don’t run on any.

The headcount doesn’t follow the department count

That balance breaks apart once you look at who’s actually on the roster. Of the 399 Georgia departments that report staffing, the directory holds 15,893 career firefighters against 7,361 volunteers — career people outnumber volunteers by better than two to one, even though career-only departments are only a quarter of the 390 that reported a type. Paid staff in Georgia cluster into a smaller number of departments; volunteer and combination departments are the majority by count and the minority by headcount. In the 129 combination departments sitting between the two, a paid crew and a volunteer roster often answer out of the same house, which means the person who ran a given call and the person who has to describe it in NERIS terms aren’t guaranteed to be the same person twice running.

More doors than one firehouse per town

Stations track the same pattern. Georgia departments report 1,799 stations across 388 that answered, which works out to 4.6 for every department that reported one, well above a single firehouse serving a single town. A department running that many buildings is filing reports out of more than one location, and NERIS keeps a separate record for each responding unit no matter which house it came out of.

What the trial actually checks

None of that has to be sorted out first. Try the trial on a single call: narrate what happened once, look at what came back against what you actually remember, and judge whether it’s close enough to be worth finishing instead of starting from a blank form. That question is the same whether the department that ran the call was paid, volunteer, or some of both. NERIS asks the same modules of all three.

Worth knowing about Georgia

Georgia's directory lists 519 fire departments, and among the 390 that report a department type, the split runs close to even three ways: 165 volunteer, 129 combination, and 96 career.
Source: snapshot: GA.department_count, GA.by_department_type, GA.departments_with_type_data
Across the 399 Georgia departments that report firefighter staffing, the directory counts 15,893 career firefighters against 7,361 volunteers — career firefighters outnumber volunteers by better than two to one.
Source: snapshot: GA.firefighters_career_sum, GA.firefighters_volunteer_sum, GA.departments_with_staffing_data
1,799 stations are reported across 388 Georgia departments that answered the question — 4.6 stations, on average, for each of those departments.
Source: snapshot: GA.station_count_sum, GA.departments_with_station_data
Only 390 of Georgia's 519 departments — about three in four — have reported a department type at all, so the volunteer/combination/career split describes most but not all of the state's fire service.
Source: snapshot: GA.department_count, GA.departments_with_type_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

A Georgia department applying for Assistance to Firefighters Grant funding is asked, as part of that application, to describe its call activity and how it operates day to day. This page can't tell you whether NERIS participation affects AFG review — that determination lives in the program's own published guidance, not on a vendor's website. The plainer point, true regardless of what that guidance says: an application is faster to complete from incident reports that already exist than from a stretch of calls nobody has written up yet.

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 Georgia 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 Georgia 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.