Kansas · NERIS
NERIS reporting for Kansas fire departments
Kansas runs mostly on volunteers, but the state's own directory isn't kept up everywhere in equal measure: some fields are filled in almost every time, one gets left blank most of the time. NERIS doesn't ask less of a department because of that.
Fire departments in Kansas
- Departments in the directory
- 561
- Volunteer departments
- 80%
- Volunteer or combination
- 94%
- Stations
- 993
396 of 497 departments that report a department type
465 of 497 departments that report a department type
reported by 507 departments
Across the 498 Kansas departments that report staffing, the directory holds 9,339 volunteer firefighters and 4,032 career firefighters; 70% 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.
What gets filled in, and what doesn’t
Start with the count: 561 Kansas fire departments sit in the NERIS directory. Three different questions on that same roster, department type (497), station count (507), and staffing (498), come back answered at almost the same rate, all within two points of each other as a share of the 561. A fourth question, how many people a department protects, drops to 203 answers: 36% of the roster, under half the rate of the other three. Nothing about keeping a department’s type or its staffing numbers current guarantees the population field gets touched too — in Kansas’s own listing, that’s the one question departments tend to skip.
Two volunteer numbers, ten points apart
By department, Kansas leans volunteer hard: 396 of the 497 typed departments (80%) are typed volunteer outright, and another 69 are combination, putting 94% of typed departments on some volunteer staffing. Only 32, 6%, are typed career. By headcount the lean is real but smaller: across the 498 departments reporting staffing, 9,339 volunteer firefighters are counted against 4,032 career, putting the volunteer share at 70%, ten points under the 80% of departments typed volunteer outright. The gap is what you’d expect if a modest number of paid positions sit inside otherwise volunteer departments, enough to pull the headcount share toward career faster than it pulls the department-type share.
Testing the gap, not closing it
Running the trial once doesn’t close the reporting-rate gap above, and it isn’t supposed to. What it tests is narrower: record one real incident, look at the structured report it turns into, and judge for yourself whether that beats however the report gets filed today. It doesn’t read Kansas’s directory, doesn’t touch your department’s roster, and doesn’t require a NERIS account to already exist.
Worth knowing about Kansas
Kansas has 561 fire departments in the NERIS public directory.
Source: snapshot: KS.department_count
Of the 497 Kansas departments that report a department type, 396 are volunteer, 69 are combination, and 32 are career — 80% volunteer outright and 94% volunteer or combination together.
Source: snapshot: KS.by_department_type, KS.departments_with_type_data
993 stations are reported across 507 of Kansas's 561 departments — just under two stations for every department that answered.
Source: snapshot: KS.station_count_sum, KS.departments_with_station_data
Across the 498 Kansas departments that report staffing, the directory counts 9,339 volunteer firefighters against 4,032 career — 70% volunteer, ten points below the 80% of departments typed volunteer outright.
Source: snapshot: KS.firefighters_volunteer_sum, KS.firefighters_career_sum, KS.departments_with_staffing_data, compared against KS.by_department_type.VOLUNTEER and KS.departments_with_type_data
Only 203 of Kansas's 561 departments — 36% — report a population-protected figure, summing to 4,732,244; that field's completion rate sits well under half of what type, station, and staffing each reach on their own.
Source: snapshot: KS.population_protected_sum, KS.departments_with_population_data, KS.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
A Kansas department applying for an Assistance to Firefighters Grant answers questions there about call volume and how the department operates, separate from anything NERIS itself asks for. We haven't found anything establishing that NERIS reporting factors into AFG eligibility or scoring, and we're not the ones positioned to settle that either way — the notice of funding opportunity is. What we'll say instead: an application is a faster form to fill out when the incidents behind it are already on file than when they're still sitting as a stack of runs nobody wrote up.
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 Kansas call
Record one incident, read the report it produces, and decide from there. No account, no card, no call with anyone.
FireMic is a private company. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or recommended by any Kansas 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.