Washington · NERIS

NERIS reporting in Washington

Washington doesn't have one typical fire department. Combination, volunteer, and career departments are each a substantial share of the state, and paid firefighters make up more of the statewide headcount than the department count alone would suggest.

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Fire departments in Washington

Departments in the directory: 426
Volunteer departments: 40%
Volunteer or combination: 85%
Stations: 1,749

Across the 382 Washington departments that report staffing, the directory holds 7,984 volunteer firefighters and 11,102 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.

Three types, not one

Of Washington’s 426 fire departments, 382 report a type: 172 combination, 154 volunteer, 56 career. Combination edges out volunteer by eighteen departments, but at 45% it’s a lead, not a majority — this isn’t a state where one flavor of department sets the norm and everyone else is the exception. A chief reading this page could run a fully volunteer company, a fully paid one, or a department where both exist on the same roster, and the shape of who ends up filing the NERIS report is different in each case.

Where the paid staff actually sit

Pure-career departments are a small slice of that group: 56 of 382, about 15%. But paid firefighters are not confined to those 56. Combination departments carry career staff too, and once you count people instead of department labels, the picture flips: across the 382 departments that report staffing, 11,102 of the 19,086 firefighters counted, 58%, are career. A department typed COMBINATION can still be run day-to-day by a paid officer with a volunteer roster filling nights and weekends, which means the person who answers a 2 a.m. call and the person who has time to sit down and finish the report are often not the same person, even inside one department.

Filing it before the shift changes

None of that changes what NERIS asks for. The same modules apply whether the report comes from an all-volunteer engine company or a battalion chief on salary. What changes is who has ten free minutes to do it and when. Record the call the way you’d tell it to the next crew coming on, read back what came out of it, correct what’s wrong, and file it, with no roster pulled in and no department account, before you decide whether it’s worth doing that way going forward.

Worth knowing about Washington

Washington's directory lists 426 fire departments, and 382 of them report a department type: 172 combination, 154 volunteer, and 56 career. Combination is the largest of the three, but at 45% it falls short of a majority.
Source: snapshot: WA.department_count, WA.by_department_type, WA.departments_with_type_data
Volunteer and combination departments together account for 326 of the 382 typed departments — 85% — so most Washington departments carry at least some volunteer staffing, whether or not a paid officer also works the same roster.
Source: snapshot: WA.by_department_type, WA.departments_with_type_data
Across the 382 Washington departments that report staffing, the directory counts 11,102 career firefighters against 7,984 volunteer firefighters. Paid firefighters are 58% of that headcount, even though departments typed purely CAREER are only 56 of the 382 — 15%.
Source: snapshot: WA.firefighters_career_sum, WA.firefighters_volunteer_sum, WA.departments_with_staffing_data, WA.by_department_type
1,749 stations are reported across 371 of Washington's 426 departments.
Source: snapshot: WA.station_count_sum, WA.departments_with_station_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

Some Washington fire departments hold Assistance to Firefighters Grant (AFG) funding, and every AFG application asks the department to describe its calls and how it operates, not just list equipment it wants. We don't know, and won't claim to know, whether current NERIS reporting affects how that description is scored — that's a question for the grant program itself, not for a company that sells reporting software. Separate from scoring entirely, there's a plain practical point: incident reports written up close to the day they happened are faster to summarize into an application than a year of calls nobody got around to writing 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 Washington 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 Washington 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.