Tennessee · NERIS

NERIS reporting in Tennessee

Fewer than one in ten of the Tennessee fire departments that report a type run purely on paid staff; most of the rest are volunteer, and NERIS asks the same of all of them, call by call.

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Fire departments in Tennessee

Departments in the directory: 679
Volunteer departments: 74%
Volunteer or combination: 90%
Stations: 1,826

Across the 637 Tennessee departments that report staffing, the directory holds 12,788 volunteer firefighters and 9,633 career firefighters; 57% 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.

Career departments are the rare ones here

Tennessee’s NERIS directory lists 679 fire departments. Of the 623 that report a department type, 458 are volunteer, 105 are combination, and 60 are career — meaning for every department typed career-only, the state has close to two typed combination and nearly eight typed volunteer. Career departments aren’t a large minority here; they’re a small one, outnumbered by combination departments alone almost two to one. NERIS doesn’t ask a career department for anything different than it asks a volunteer one; the incident hierarchy and the modules are the same. But a department where paperwork is somebody’s actual job is rarer in Tennessee than the department count alone suggests.

The roster count doesn’t say who’s on which roster

Across the 637 Tennessee departments that report firefighter staffing, the directory counts 12,788 volunteers against 9,633 career firefighters. What it doesn’t do is split that count by department type, so there’s no way to say how much of that 9,633 sits inside Tennessee’s 60 career departments versus how much is the paid half of a roster inside one of the 105 combination departments. That distinction matters for who actually narrates a given incident: a combination department’s report could come from the paid side of the house or the volunteer side, and the state directory alone won’t tell you which one before the call.

Two smaller numbers, briefly

1,826 stations are reported across 640 of the state’s 679 departments, close to three per department that answered. Population served is the field fewest departments fill in: 292 of 679, summing to 6,999,330.

What actually changed

NFIRS, the federal system Tennessee departments used to report through, was decommissioned in February 2026. NERIS took its place, and incident reporting now runs through it instead of the old form.

See what it does with one real incident

The quickest way to know whether this fits a Tennessee department is to hand it one incident you already ran and see what comes back. Describe the call out loud the way you’d tell the next shift, then check the structured report against what you remember before deciding whether it beats writing the call up by hand. None of that requires a department to be enrolled in NERIS yet or to have a FireMic account. Just the one incident, talked through.

Worth knowing about Tennessee

Tennessee's NERIS directory lists 679 fire departments, and 623 of them report a department type — 458 volunteer, 105 combination, and 60 career.
Source: snapshot: TN.department_count, TN.by_department_type, TN.departments_with_type_data
Of those 623 typed departments, only 60 — 9.6% — are career-only; combination departments (105) outnumber career departments nearly two to one, and volunteer departments (458) outnumber them almost eight to one.
Source: snapshot: TN.by_department_type, TN.departments_with_type_data
Across the 637 Tennessee departments that report firefighter staffing, the directory counts 12,788 volunteer firefighters against 9,633 career — 57% of the counted headcount is volunteer, a narrower margin than the 90% of departments typed volunteer or combination.
Source: snapshot: TN.firefighters_volunteer_sum, TN.firefighters_career_sum, TN.departments_with_staffing_data, TN.by_department_type, TN.departments_with_type_data
NFIRS, the federal system NERIS replaces, was decommissioned in February 2026, and departments now report incidents through NERIS instead.
Source: repo: docs/specs/firereports-buildout/WS4-growth-surface.md §2 — describes NFIRS's February 2026 decommissioning and NERIS taking its place
1,826 stations are reported across 640 of Tennessee's 679 departments — about 2.9 stations for every department that answered the question.
Source: snapshot: TN.station_count_sum, TN.departments_with_station_data, TN.department_count
Only 292 of Tennessee's 679 departments — 43% — have entered a population-protected figure, summing to 6,999,330; the type, station, and staffing fields are each answered by at least 91% of departments.
Source: snapshot: TN.population_protected_sum, TN.departments_with_population_data, TN.department_count, TN.departments_with_type_data, TN.departments_with_station_data, TN.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

The Assistance to Firefighters Grant application asks what a department operates and how many calls it ran, whether the department answering is one of Tennessee's 60 career departments, one of its 105 combination departments, or one of the 458 typed volunteer. Nothing in this repository says a completed NERIS report changes how that application reads to a reviewer, and a reporting vendor guessing at a federal program's own scoring would be worse than staying quiet on it. What holds up regardless of that question: pulling operational numbers from reports already on file is less work than reconstructing them once the application is open.

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 Tennessee 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 Tennessee 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.