What 2026 Fire Department Data Tells You About Your Own Operation
Pull your department’s call log from last year and ask one question: how many of those runs were actually fires? For most departments, the answer sits around 3 percent. That’s one finding from the 2026 Fire Service Index, which analyzed more than 10.2 million incidents from over 3,800 departments, the largest fire department data set the report has assembled. It also happens to cover the last full year before NERIS replaced NFIRS, which makes it a clean baseline: a picture of how the fire service actually operated right before the reporting standard changed underneath it.
None of the headline numbers will shock anyone who’s run a tour. EMS dominates volume. Structure fires concentrate in homes. Response times cluster near NFPA benchmarks. The value isn’t in confirming what you already know. It’s in having a national figure to hold your own data against, and in seeing where the old reporting system left gaps that NERIS is built to close. This article does three things: it explains what the index is and where the numbers come from, lays out why a busy chief should care, and then walks through the six findings that matter most, with what each one means for your crew, your budget, and your reporting.
What Is the Fire Service Index?
It’s an annual report published by ESO, a fire and EMS data and software company. Now in its eighth edition, the index pulls from incident data that departments running ESO’s fire RMS contribute to a shared pool called the ESO Data Collaborative, then aggregates it into national patterns any department can measure itself against. The 2026 edition covered 10,237,656 incidents from 3,805 agencies, its largest data set yet. ESO produces it as a way to give the fire service a benchmarking tool, built from the data it collects.
A few things are worth knowing about where these numbers come from. The report reflects agencies on ESO’s platform, so it isn’t a complete national census, and the publishers say as much. Reporting practices vary between departments, and some fields carry meaningful rates of missing data. None of that makes the findings less useful. It just means you should read them as directional: a starting point for questions about your own data rather than a verdict on it. ESO is one vendor among several in this space, but the index is still one of the more substantial public looks at how the fire service operates, and the patterns it surfaces hold up against what most chiefs see on the ground.
Why Should You Care About National Fire Data?
You run on limited time, so here’s the honest case for spending some of it on a national report. Three reasons stand out.
First, it’s a benchmark. A turnout time, a decontamination rate, or a sprinkler-presence figure means very little on its own. You only know whether your department is ahead, on pace, or behind once you can set your own numbers next to a national pattern. This index gives you that comparison across six operational areas at once.
Second, these numbers are budget and grant ammunition. Call volume, response times, and exposure documentation are exactly the figures that justify staffing, apparatus, and funding requests. When your own data is incomplete, the case you bring to the council or the fire board is weaker than the work you actually do. The national figures show you what to track, and where undercounting quietly costs departments money.
Third, the timing is specific. This is the last full year of NFIRS data, captured right as NERIS came online. The patterns here are the ones your department carries into a new reporting system, and the gaps the data exposes are the ones NERIS was designed to fix. The departments that tighten their reporting habits now will get the most out of what comes next.
What Does the Data Say About Your Real Call Volume?
EMS isn’t part of the workload. For most departments, it is the workload. The index found that rescue and EMS calls made up 66 percent of all responses, while fire-specific incidents accounted for just 3 percent. Good intent calls, service calls, and false alarms covered another 27 percent between them.
There’s a catch buried in that 66 percent: it’s probably low. As departments moved between reporting systems, some stopped writing separate incident reports for EMS runs inside their fire RMS. That EMS volume happens, but it never shows up in the count. The practical problem is money. Undercounted call volume understates the real demand on your staffing and apparatus, and that gap can quietly affect grant eligibility and how resources get allocated when budget season comes around.
If you haven’t audited your call volume by incident type recently, that’s a worthwhile afternoon. Run the breakdown, confirm every EMS run is generating a record, and bring the real numbers into your next conversation with the council or the fire board. Data you can’t produce is data that can’t argue for you.
Where Are Structure Fires Actually Happening?
In homes, overwhelmingly. Residential properties accounted for 79 percent of structure fire responses, and among those, single-family and two-family dwellings made up 77 percent. None of that is new. What’s worth noting is that working fires climbed to 61 percent of structure fire responses, up four points from the prior edition. More of the structure fires departments caught last year demanded real commitments of people and time.
The harder number is sprinklers. Automatic extinguishing systems were documented as present in only 7 percent of structure fire incidents. Another 82 percent had none, and 11 percent were undetermined. That figure hasn’t budged. Residential sprinklers remain one of the most effective life-safety tools available, and they’re absent from the property types where crews respond most often.
This is where your own data earns its keep. If your RMS tracks sprinkler presence by property type and area, you can see exactly where the suppression gaps are and aim your community risk reduction work at them. Departments that bring building officials, developers, and community leaders to the table tend to get further on sprinkler adoption than those leaning on code mandates alone. Worth knowing too: property loss figures are about to change. NERIS is replacing field loss estimates, the ones your crew guesses at right after a call, with insurance-sourced numbers. Loss data in your reports will look different. Brief your elected officials before they see it and wonder why.
Is Wildland Fire Still a Seasonal Problem?
No, and the data is direct about it. Outdoor fires peaked in March, but wildland incidents showed up in every month of the year. Even December logged roughly 3,700 wildland fire incidents. The seasonal mental model, fire season as a window you prepare for and then close, no longer matches what departments are running.
That shift reaches past traditionally high-risk regions. Metropolitan departments are increasingly drawn into mutual aid for wildland operations outside their own jurisdiction, which means structural crews working in an environment where structural PPE and tactics don’t apply. If your department hasn’t assessed its wildland exposure lately, review your monthly incident history and geography to figure out where and when you actually need wildland-capable resources.
The report also surfaced a documentation problem that should bother any chief who cares about prevention: 72 percent of outdoor fires had no cause recorded at all. You can’t build a prevention program around data that doesn’t say why things are burning. Closing that gap is a reporting discipline question more than a software question, but the right RMS makes the cause field hard to skip.
How Does Your Response Time Data Compare to NFPA 1710?
Closer than you might expect at the median, and further than you’d like at the edges. Median fire turnout time came in at 71 seconds, inside the 80-second NFPA 1710 standard. Median fire travel time was 4 minutes 25 seconds, about 25 seconds over the 4-minute benchmark. Median total fire response landed just under 7 minutes.
The median is the comfortable number. The 90th percentile is the honest one. At the 90th percentile, fire response time stretched past 17 minutes, more than double the median. That spread reflects the real range in the dataset, from career companies in dense cities to volunteer departments covering rural ground. A department-wide average can hide a station that’s consistently slow, which is why station-level analysis tends to reveal what the headline figure smooths over.
New this year was a look at turnout time by working fire status. Confirmed working fires showed a median turnout of 76 seconds versus 69 for nonworking fires, and the gap widened sharply at the 90th percentile. Part of that is the dispatch sequence itself: initial tone, multiple unit announcements, channel assignments, more firefighters climbing onto the apparatus. When you benchmark turnout, decide whether you’re starting the clock at the first tone or at the end of the full notification. The answer changes the number, and it matters most when several agencies get toned out at once.
Why Does Decontamination Documentation Matter So Much?
Because cancer is the leading cause of line-of-duty death in the fire service, and documentation is one of the few protections a firefighter fully controls. The encouraging news: 77 percent of incidents with documented fire or smoke exposure included at least one decontamination procedure, up from 75 percent. The sobering news: across nearly 29,000 exposure incidents and roughly 135,000 individual exposures, all four recommended on-scene decon steps were documented together only 651 times, about 2 percent.
There’s a fear that’s held this back for years. Some firefighters worry that documenting exposures could come back to hurt them on employment, insurance, or disability claims. The evidence runs the other way. A consistent exposure record is exactly what supports those claims down the line. The longitudinal data is the protection, not the threat.
The mechanism that moved the needle is worth copying: the number of departments using a validation rule that prompts personnel to complete the decontamination field before closing an exposure incident grew substantially. That’s documentation built into the workflow instead of left to memory at the end of a hard call. If your RMS can enforce a decon field on exposure incidents, turn it on. Implementation of the underlying on-scene practices runs roughly $150 per station. The framework comes from the Lavender Ribbon Report, published by the IAFC and NVFC.
What About EV and Lithium-Battery Fires?
This is where the old system showed its age most plainly. The index identified just 19 electric vehicle and e-bike fire incidents, spread across 10 different incident type classifications. That count almost certainly undercounts reality, and the reason is structural: NFIRS had no dedicated code for EV fires. Crews had to pick from classifications that didn’t fit, or the incident disappeared into general vehicle fires, a category holding nearly 44,840 records.
NERIS fixes this with a standardized Electrical System Storage classification, which gives the fire service consistent EV fire tracking for the first time. Until your department is fully on that standard, here’s the practical move:
- Check how EV, e-bike, and lithium-battery fires are currently coded in your RMS.
- If they’re landing in general vehicle fires, create a local custom incident type now.
- Start capturing them under that type so you build a usable data trail.
- Map that custom type to the NERIS classification when you transition.
A small step today means you won’t be starting from zero when EV fire trends become a question your jurisdiction wants answered.
What These Findings Have in Common
Read the six findings together and a single theme runs through all of them. The EMS undercount, the missing fire causes, the inconsistent property loss estimates, the absent EV code, the thin decon records. None of these are really fire problems. They’re data problems. The fire service has always done the work. It hasn’t always had a system built to capture the work in a form that holds up later, in a grant application, a budget hearing, a disability claim, or a prevention program.
That’s the quiet story underneath this year’s fire department data, and it’s why the timing matters. NERIS is built to capture what NFIRS couldn’t: people rescued, actions taken, structure subtypes, resources deployed, insurance-sourced loss. But the system only delivers if the habits are there. The departments that tighten their reporting discipline now, making sure every EMS run generates a record, every cause field gets filled, every exposure gets documented, will be the ones positioned to use what NERIS makes possible. RedAlert Desktop is built to handle that capture end to end, from incident creation through NERIS submission, so the documentation happens as part of the call rather than as a chore after it. For the full picture of how the transition works, the NERIS in RedAlert webinar walks through it with a live demo.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where does this fire department data come from? The figures come from the 2026 ESO Fire Service Index, an annual report from the fire and EMS data and software company ESO. It analyzed 10,237,656 incidents from 3,805 departments during calendar year 2025, drawn from agencies that contribute to the ESO Data Collaborative. Because 2025 was the last full year of reporting under NFIRS, the data serves as a baseline against which departments can measure themselves as they move into the NERIS era.
Does EMS really make up two-thirds of fire department calls? Yes, and likely more. The data put EMS and rescue calls at 66 percent of total volume, with fire-specific incidents at 3 percent. The EMS figure is probably an undercount, since some departments stopped logging separate EMS records during the reporting transition. Auditing your own call volume by incident type is the way to confirm what your real numbers look like.
Why are property loss numbers going to change under NERIS? NFIRS relied on field loss estimates produced by firefighters right after a call, which rarely matched insurance-verified figures. NERIS replaces those estimates with insurance-sourced data. Loss figures in your reports will shift as a result, so it’s worth briefing your governing body before they notice the difference and ask about it.
How do we start tracking EV fires before we’re fully on NERIS? Create a local custom incident type in your RMS now and code EV, e-bike, and lithium-battery fires under it, rather than letting them disappear into general vehicle fires. That builds a data trail you can map to the NERIS Electrical System Storage classification once you transition.
What’s the single most useful thing to do with these findings? Run your own numbers against them. Pull your call volume by incident type, your response times by station, and your decontamination documentation rate, then compare. National figures only become useful when they tell you where your department diverges from the pattern.
Looking for tools that make your department’s data easier to capture and report? Explore what RedAlert offers or get in touch with our team. No pressure, just a real look at what it can do.
