Wisconsin · NERIS

What NERIS means for Wisconsin's fire departments

Wisconsin's 801 fire departments are mostly volunteer, whether you count organizations or the firefighters staffing them. NERIS asks the same set of questions of all of them regardless of who's answering.

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Fire departments in Wisconsin

Departments in the directory: 801
Volunteer departments: 78%
Volunteer or combination: 93%
Stations: 1,146

Across the 660 Wisconsin departments that report staffing, the directory holds 14,794 volunteer firefighters and 5,504 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.

Volunteer either way you count it

Wisconsin’s directory lists 801 fire departments. Among the 697 that report what kind of department they run, 545 are volunteer, 105 are combination, and 47 are career-only. Volunteer and combination together make up 93% of that group. Switch from counting organizations to counting people and the picture holds: across the 660 departments that also report staffing, the directory counts 14,794 volunteer firefighters against 5,504 career, a 73% volunteer share of the 20,298 firefighters counted. The margin is narrower by headcount than by department type, but nobody’s fire service flips from volunteer to career depending on which column you read.

The 105 departments in between

Combination departments are the ones where that distinction actually plays out on a truck. A paid officer might drive the rig out the door while a volunteer signs the report afterward, or the reverse, and NERIS doesn’t ask which arrangement produced the incident — it asks the same modules regardless. With 105 of Wisconsin’s 697 typed departments running that way, that’s not a rare setup here; it’s roughly one department in seven.

An average crew, not a lone volunteer

Divide the 20,298 counted firefighters by the 660 departments that reported staffing and the average comes to about 31 people per department. That’s not a battalion, but it’s enough that the report from a given call isn’t necessarily written by whoever happened to answer it; it can land on whichever of that crew is willing to sit down afterward. Wisconsin’s own directory is also unusually complete on the fields that matter for this: 87% of departments report a type, 96% report a station count, 82% report staffing. Only the population-protected field lags, filled in by 27% of the roster.

Talk through your next call in FireMic and read back what it turns into. That test beats reading about it here.

Worth knowing about Wisconsin

Wisconsin has 801 fire departments in the NERIS public directory. Of the 697 that report a department type, 545 are volunteer, 105 are combination, and 47 are career-only — volunteer and combination together account for 93% of the departments that answered.
Source: snapshot: WI.department_count, WI.by_department_type, WI.departments_with_type_data
Across the 660 Wisconsin departments that report firefighter staffing, the directory counts 14,794 volunteer firefighters against 5,504 career — 73% of the 20,298 counted are volunteers.
Source: snapshot: WI.firefighters_volunteer_sum, WI.firefighters_career_sum, WI.departments_with_staffing_data
1,146 stations are reported across 766 of Wisconsin's 801 departments — 96% of the roster answered that question, one of the more completely filled-in fields in the state's own directory.
Source: snapshot: WI.station_count_sum, WI.departments_with_station_data, WI.department_count
Divide the 20,298 counted firefighters by the 660 departments that reported staffing and the average works out to about 31 per department — a small crew, not a single volunteer working alone.
Source: snapshot: WI.firefighters_volunteer_sum, WI.firefighters_career_sum, WI.departments_with_staffing_data
Only 220 of Wisconsin's 801 departments — 27% — report a population-protected figure, summing to 1,625,256; that's well behind how completely the type (697), station (766), and staffing (660) fields are answered.
Source: snapshot: WI.population_protected_sum, WI.departments_with_population_data, WI.department_count, compared against WI.departments_with_type_data, WI.departments_with_station_data, WI.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

An Assistance to Firefighters Grant application asks about call volume and how a department is staffed — a question that takes more untangling for Wisconsin's 105 combination departments, where paid and volunteer firefighters serve on the same roster, than for a department that's simply one or the other. Whether NERIS reporting factors into AFG eligibility or scoring isn't something we've found in writing, and a records vendor isn't the source to trust on federal grant rules regardless. The narrower point that does hold: those call-volume and staffing figures are quicker to pull from incident reports already on file than from a logbook nobody's kept current.

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 Wisconsin 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.