Texas · NERIS

NERIS reporting in Texas

Texas's fire service splits two ways: hundreds of volunteer departments covering the distance between towns, and a smaller number of career departments carrying most of the paid staff in the cities. NERIS applies to both the same way, station house or truck cab an hour from town.

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Fire departments in Texas

Departments in the directory: 1,883
Volunteer departments: 67%
Volunteer or combination: 85%
Stations: 3,881

Across the 1,498 Texas departments that report staffing, the directory holds 25,416 volunteer firefighters and 35,576 career firefighters; 42% 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.

One directory, two different fire services

Texas’s numbers split cleanly in half. By department count, this is volunteer country: of the 1,474 departments that report a type, 994 are volunteer and 252 are combination, which means 85% run on volunteers to some degree, against 228 that are career only. Flip to who is actually staffing those departments and the picture reverses. Across the 1,498 departments that report staffing, the directory counts 35,576 career firefighters against 25,416 volunteers. The 15% of departments that are career-only account for 58% of the counted headcount. Put plainly, a small number of big-city career departments carry most of the paid staff, while a much larger number of small volunteer departments cover most of the map.

Distance shows up in the station numbers too. The 1,436 departments that reported a station count list 3,881 stations between them, 2.7 per department on average. That’s more houses per department than in a state where one firehouse per town is the norm. Every station answers calls, and every call still needs its own NERIS report, whether the incident happened five minutes from wherever the paperwork gets done or an hour down a farm-to-market road.

What actually gets easier

None of that changes by finding more discipline. It changes when filing a report stops requiring a desk. A department running several stations across a wide district usually does not have a clerk whose job is data entry; it has whoever answered the call, filing it themselves, later, if at all. Recording the incident out loud on the drive back and reviewing what comes back before the details fade is a different task than reconstructing the same call from memory that night, or from a runsheet a week later. The report does not get easier to write — it gets faster to finish, and for a crew an hour from the station, faster is the difference between filed tonight and still pending in March.

Worth knowing about Texas

Texas has 1,883 fire departments in the NERIS public directory. Of the 1,436 that reported a station count, the total comes to 3,881 stations — 2.7 stations, on average, for every department that answered.
Source: snapshot: TX.department_count, TX.station_count_sum, TX.departments_with_station_data
Of the 1,474 Texas departments that report a department type, 994 are volunteer, 252 are combination, and 228 are career — 85% of the departments that report a type run on volunteers to some degree.
Source: snapshot: TX.by_department_type, TX.departments_with_type_data
Across the 1,498 Texas departments that report staffing, the directory counts 35,576 career firefighters against 25,416 volunteers — the 228 career-only departments (15% of those typed) account for 58% of the counted headcount.
Source: snapshot: TX.firefighters_career_sum, TX.firefighters_volunteer_sum, TX.departments_with_staffing_data, TX.by_department_type, TX.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

If your department applies for an Assistance to Firefighters Grant, part of what the application asks about is your call volume and your operations. We cannot tell you whether NERIS reporting counts toward AFG eligibility — that question belongs to the notice of funding opportunity itself, not to a reporting vendor's page. The narrower, honest thing we can say: describing your operations is more straightforward from reports filed close to when the call happened than from ones pieced together later, across however many stations your department runs.

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 Texas 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.