NFIRS is over. Here's what NERIS means for your department.

What is NERIS?

NERIS is the National Emergency Response Information System: a modern, cloud-based platform for collecting fire and emergency response data nationwide. It was developed by the Fire Safety Research Institute (FSRI), part of UL Research Institutes, in partnership with the U.S. Fire Administration (USFA), and it replaces the National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS) that departments have submitted to since the 1970s.

The goal is better data: NFIRS's code structure dated to an era of paper forms, and the fire service's actual work (overdose responses, wildland interface fires, lithium-ion battery incidents) had outgrown it. NERIS captures incidents in a structure built for analysis, so the data departments submit can actually come back to them as something useful.

The transition is no longer theoretical. NFIRS was fully decommissioned in January 2026, and early-adopting departments had logged more than one million incident reports in NERIS by the end of 2025. NERIS is free to departments, incidents can flow in through direct web entry or, the better path for most departments, their RMS vendor's certified API integration, and gives departments control of their incident data.

Is Alpine Software an official NERIS integration partner?

Yes. Alpine Software is listed as an official integration partner on FSRI's own NERIS integration partners page, and RedAlert is NERIS V1 certified. That listing is the check worth running on any vendor: a certified, live integration is a different thing from a roadmap slide, and FSRI publishes who actually has one. Look us up there, then look up whoever else you're considering.

Why it matters to your department

Three reasons. First, compliance: federal reporting requirements, state fire marshal submissions, and grant eligibility follow the national standard, and that standard is now NERIS. Second, workflow: NERIS changes how incidents are structured and submitted, which lands directly on the officers writing reports, multi-station departments and districts with multiple FDIDs feel this most. Third, leverage: a reporting transition this large is when departments discover whether their software vendor is ready, honest, and responsive. Many departments are using the NERIS transition as the moment to fix a bigger problem: software they've outgrown.

What departments are actually running into

The pain we hear from departments mid-transition is specific: county systems whose stations each report separately now juggling a dozen NERIS logins; chiefs worried that incident-type changes will muddy the dwelling-fire documentation their ISO audit depends on; alerting-only vendors that have announced no NERIS plans at all, forcing a software decision on a deadline. None of these are hypothetical. They're from our conversations with departments this year.