Kentucky · NERIS

NERIS reporting in Kentucky

Kentucky's federal directory answers three questions, type, stations, and staffing, about most of its fire departments, and answers a fourth, who they protect, for barely one in five. NERIS doesn't shrink to fit whichever departments left a field blank.

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Fire departments in Kentucky

Departments in the directory: 816
Volunteer departments: 76%
Volunteer or combination: 92%
Stations: 1,314

Across the 705 Kentucky departments that report staffing, the directory holds 15,167 volunteer firefighters and 5,559 career firefighters; 73% 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 Kentucky answers, and what it skips

Ask Kentucky’s 816 listed fire departments four questions and three of them get answered at close to the same rate: 701 give a department type, 677 give a station count, and 705 give a staffing number, all landing in the low-to-mid 80s as a share of the full 816. The fourth question, how many people a department protects, gets answered by just 148, or 18%. Whatever else a department fills in on this directory, population served is the field most of them leave blank.

What the 92% is actually built from

Of the 701 departments that did give a type, 536 are volunteer and 111 are combination; that’s 647 together, 92%, against 54 typed career. That 92% isn’t a guess about the rest of the state; it’s what 701 departments specifically said about themselves. Staffing backs it up from a different angle: 15,167 volunteer firefighters against 5,559 career, across the 705 departments that reported a headcount, puts volunteers at 73% of every firefighter counted.

Two stations, twenty-nine firefighters, one name on the report

Divide the totals by the departments behind them and a typical answering department comes into focus: 1,314 stations across 677 departments works out to 1.9 for each one, and 20,726 firefighters across 705 departments works out to 29 for each one — most of those 29 unpaid. That’s not a department with a separate person for records. It’s a department where whoever ran the call is also the one NERIS expects a report from, same as it was under the old form, just organized differently now.

Try it on the last call, not the backlog

The fastest way to find out whether this fits your department is to stop reading and try it on the last call you actually ran. Say what happened, watch which fields fill themselves in, and fix the rest yourself. That single pass is the entire trial: no department code, no NERIS sign-in, and nothing about Kentucky’s own numbers, complete or not, needs settling before you do it.

Worth knowing about Kentucky

Kentucky's directory lists 816 fire departments, and 701 of them answered the department-type question: 536 volunteer, 111 combination, and 54 career.
Source: snapshot: KY.department_count, KY.by_department_type, KY.departments_with_type_data
Volunteer and combination departments together are 647 of those 701 typed departments — 92% — leaving 54, about 8%, typed as career only.
Source: snapshot: KY.by_department_type, KY.departments_with_type_data
1,314 stations are reported across 677 Kentucky departments — 1.9 stations for every department that answered the question.
Source: snapshot: KY.station_count_sum, KY.departments_with_station_data
Across the 705 Kentucky departments that reported firefighter staffing, the directory counts 15,167 volunteers and 5,559 career firefighters — volunteers are 73% of everyone counted.
Source: snapshot: KY.firefighters_volunteer_sum, KY.firefighters_career_sum, KY.departments_with_staffing_data
Only 148 of Kentucky's 816 departments — 18% — report a population-protected figure, well below the 83% to 86% that answered the type, station, and staffing questions.
Source: snapshot: KY.departments_with_population_data, KY.department_count, KY.departments_with_type_data, KY.departments_with_station_data, KY.departments_with_staffing_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

AFG funding reaches plenty of departments shaped like the ones in this dataset — the 92% of Kentucky's typed departments running volunteer or combination, most of them out of a station or two with a mostly-unpaid roster behind them. Nothing we can point to says NERIS reporting factors into how those applications get scored, so this page won't claim it does. What's true regardless: the application still asks what a department ran and who was on it, and a report that's already filed answers that faster than a call log somebody has to go rebuild.

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 Kentucky 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 Kentucky 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.