Indiana · NERIS

What NERIS reporting looks like in Indiana

Count Indiana's fire departments by type and volunteers dominate. Count firefighters instead and the volunteer share drops by more than ten points: the same state, two different pictures, depending on which number you're looking at.

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Fire departments in Indiana

Departments in the directory: 830
Volunteer departments: 72%
Volunteer or combination: 88%
Stations: 1,425

Across the 725 Indiana departments that report staffing, the directory holds 13,562 volunteer firefighters and 9,806 career firefighters; 58% 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.

Two ways to count Indiana’s fire service, two different shares

Indiana’s 736 typed departments lean volunteer by a wide margin — 531 of them, plus another 119 running a mixed paid-and-volunteer roster, against just 86 carrying career staff only. Read only that, and the state looks close to three-quarters volunteer. Switch to the staffing rows and the share moves: of the 725 departments that report actual headcounts, volunteers make up 58% of the people counted, not 72%. The two figures aren’t measuring the same thing, since one counts organizations and the other counts individual firefighters, and the gap between them tracks fairly closely with how many of those organizations are typed combination rather than purely volunteer. A department can read as “volunteer” on the directory’s type field while still carrying enough paid staff on the roster to pull its own headcount numbers toward career.

More than one door per department, more often than not

Station reporting is close to complete here, with 707 of the 830 departments answering, and together they list 1,425 stations, which comes out to just over 2 stations for every department that responded. That’s not a one-house-per-town state. A department running two buildings is running two separate places an incident can start from, and NERIS keeps a distinct record for each unit that responds, regardless of which bay it came out of. The module list a two-station volunteer company fills out doesn’t get shorter because its roster is smaller than a career department’s — it’s the same set of questions, asked as many times as there are units on scene.

The one field this directory barely touches

Type, staffing, and station data are each filled in by at least 85% of Indiana’s departments. Population protected isn’t: only 179 of the 830, about one in five, have entered a figure at all, too thin a slice of the state to add up into a coverage number worth printing here. It’s a specific kind of gap, where most of the form gets answered every time and one part of it consistently doesn’t, and it isn’t so different from what shows up inside an individual NERIS report when the last field goes unanswered because the next call already came in.

Worth knowing about Indiana

Indiana has 830 fire departments in the NERIS public directory, and 736 of them report a department type — 531 volunteer, 119 combination, and 86 career.
Source: snapshot: IN.department_count, IN.by_department_type, IN.departments_with_type_data
Volunteer and combination departments together make up 650 of Indiana's 736 typed departments (88%), while volunteer alone is 531 of 736 (72%) — the 16-point gap between those two shares is entirely the combination departments.
Source: snapshot: IN.by_department_type, IN.departments_with_type_data
Across the 725 Indiana departments that report staffing, the directory counts 13,562 volunteer firefighters and 9,806 career firefighters — volunteers are 58% of that headcount, well below the 72% of departments typed volunteer.
Source: snapshot: IN.firefighters_volunteer_sum, IN.firefighters_career_sum, IN.departments_with_staffing_data, IN.by_department_type, IN.departments_with_type_data
1,425 stations are reported across 707 of Indiana's 830 departments — just over 2 stations for every department that answered the question.
Source: snapshot: IN.station_count_sum, IN.departments_with_station_data
Only 179 of Indiana's 830 departments — about one in five — report a population-protected figure, too thin a share of the state to add into a statewide coverage number on this page.
Source: snapshot: IN.population_protected_sum, IN.departments_with_population_data, IN.department_count

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 Assistance to Firefighters Grant application asks a department to describe its call volume and how it operates, categories that already exist inside a filed NERIS report. This page isn't the place to settle whether the two are formally connected — that's the grant program's own guidance, not a software vendor's opinion. The plain part, true regardless: pulling those answers from incidents already on file takes less work than reconstructing a year of runs from a logbook or memory afterward.

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.

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FireMic is a private company. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or recommended by any Indiana 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.