NERIS Version 1.5: What Changed for Fire Departments

Introduction

Your crew spent three hours on a combine fire in a dry field last harvest. The machine was towing extra fuel, the nearest hydrant was four miles off, and you committed two engines to keep the field from going. Then it got logged as a vehicle fire. Same code as a sedan on the shoulder of the interstate.

NERIS Version 1.5 fixes that one, and roughly two dozen others like it.

The NERIS team traces the changes back to thousands of helpdesk tickets, multiple national engagements, and hallway conversations with firefighters who found the gaps on real calls. This guide covers what's new, what it means for the data you pull at year end, and what to do about it this month.

What Is NERIS Version 1.5 and When Does It Take Effect?

NERIS Version 1.5 is a schema update to the National Emergency Response Information System, effective October 1, 2026. It adds new incident types, actions and tactics, location classifications, and fields across the entity, incident, and incident analysis schemas.

Nine months from launch to first revision is fast for a national data system, and the pace is deliberate. When a national standard sits still, departments and states build their own fields to cover what's missing, and those workarounds fragment the data.

The U.S. Fire Administration, which leads NERIS, has framed V1.5 as the start of regular updates rather than a one-time correction. The NERIS v1.5 technical document carries the full breakdown, and the release announcement includes a walkthrough video with Craig Rollins of USFA and Craig Weinschenk of NERIS.

Will NERIS V1.5 Break Your RMS Integration?

No. Everything in V1.5 is additive. No field was removed, the API structure didn't change, and existing integrations, dashboards, and saved reports keep working without modification.

So the real question for Chiefs isn't whether V1.5 breaks anything. It's how fast your vendor turns the new fields on.

Don't assume your RMS already has V1.5. NERIS is a fire service standard, and it competes for development time differently depending on who built your records system. If your department reports NERIS through a platform designed mainly for EMS or law enforcement, a fire-specific schema revision is one priority among many. Those updates tend to arrive later, and that repeats: USFA has said more releases are coming.

Check for yourself rather than taking a general statement of NERIS support at face value. Open your RMS: can you code an agricultural vehicle fire? Is ice rescue separate from flood rescue? If those fields aren't there, you're still submitting valid data. You're just not capturing anything new.

RedAlert customers already have them. Alpine shipped V1.5 support in RedAlert Desktop v2.0.27, ahead of the October 1 schema change, and the new values switched on the day NERIS made the change live. That release covers the 1.5 schema across Incident, Incident Analysis, and Entity data:

• New location values, including the Person Experiencing Homelessness field, plus expanded location use options
• New incident types and subtypes under their existing parent categories
• New actions and tactics values, plus the Rapid Intervention Established tactic timestamp
• Updated special modifiers: Civil Unrest added, World Cup removed for new incidents. Historical values stay visible but are flagged invalid for submission.
• Fire module enumeration updates, with legacy values such as Arson preserved on historical records ahead of the NERIS 2.0 deprecation

These changes land inside the reporting forms your crew already knows. The NERIS in RedAlert: From Setup to Submission webinar walks through the workflow with a live demo.

What New Incident Types Does NERIS Version 1.5 Add?

The theme is splitting. Categories that lumped very different jobs into one bucket now separate out.

New incident type	How it was coded before V1.5
Agricultural vehicle fire	Generic vehicle fire
Micromobility collision (e-bikes, scooters, boards)	Generic motor vehicle collision
Human-powered vehicle collision (bicycles, skateboards, wheelchairs)	Generic motor vehicle collision
Ice rescue	One undifferentiated water rescue type
Flood rescue	One undifferentiated water rescue type
Surf or rip-current rescue in tidal water	One undifferentiated water rescue type
Obstruction and debris removal (trees down, non-energized wires)	No dedicated type
Water leak or flooding on the private side of the main	No dedicated type
Alert 2 aviation emergency (standby for an aircraft with a known problem)	No dedicated type

Agricultural vehicle fires. A combine fire during harvest isn't a car fire. The machine is bigger, it's often towing extra fuel, and it's sitting in a field that will burn if you don't get ahead of it. Those calls now pull out of your vehicle fire numbers and get counted nationally.

Micromobility and human-powered vehicles. Under the old coding, a rider thrown from a 28 mph e-bike looked identical in the data to a fender-bender. V1.5 splits micromobility collisions into their own type and gives human-powered vehicles a second one. NERIS isn't the only national record of these crashes: NEMSIS captures the patient side, NHTSA and NIBRS the traffic safety and law enforcement pieces. What NERIS adds is the fire and EMS response itself.

Water rescue, split three ways. Ice, flood, and surf are different jobs. Surf rescue is getting through breaking waves fast, and in much of the country that work belongs to lifeguard agencies with fire responding alongside. A matching outdoor location type, tidal water, came with it.

“On much of our coastline, firefighters are not the sole agency involved with water responses. … USFA's separation of surf and tidal water rescues as distinct incident types in the NERIS system is a first step toward data that reflects how those complex calls actually run.”

What Changed in Actions and Tactics Reporting?

This is where V1.5 gets at work your crews have always done without it ever showing in the data.

Non-patient EMS support. The most requested addition in the release, and the successor to the old catch-all of providing manpower. Any time your crew assists an EMS agency without hands-on patient care, this is the value.

Stabilization tactics. Vehicle, structure, and earth or trench stabilization now sit under hazardous situation mitigation, along with vehicle electrical disconnection. The rescue itself still records in the casualty and rescue module. What was missing is everything that happens first: step chocks and struts before anyone goes near the vehicle, shoring before a crew drops into the trench.

“Structure stabilization has never shown up in the data, even though fire departments perform this service routinely. … Being able to capture stabilization as its own action, regardless of the incident type, means departments can show the full scope of what they're actually doing on scene.”

RIT establishment, with a timestamp. Rapid intervention team establishment joins the list as an action, carrying a timestamp for when the team was stood up. Paired with the unit arrival timestamps your record already captures, that gives you an interval. Across enough incidents, you can check your actual RIT timing against your own operating guidelines.

Ground ladders, aerials, and master streams. Ground ladder and aerial ladder use join the actions and tactics list, and aerial master stream becomes a suppression appliance in the fire module. Before V1.5 this lived in narrative text, where it couldn't be counted. Aerial apparatus is among the largest capital purchases a department makes, and replacement planning gets easier when you can show recorded use.

How Did Location and Occupancy Classifications Change?

The old occupancy list pushed a lot of operationally distinct buildings into generic commercial and industrial buckets. V1.5 pulls several of them out.

New occupancy types. Data centers, mega warehouses (200,000 square feet and up), automated storage and retrieval systems, commercial greenhouses, aquatic facilities, and fitness centers all become their own location uses. A data center is close to empty from an occupant standpoint but runs continuously and carries unusual electrical and thermal hazards.

Location modifiers: short-term rental, hoarding, excessive fuel load. A new modifier flags these three conditions alongside the occupancy code, so the code stays correct and the modifier carries the rest. A hoarded house is still a single-family dwelling. What the modifier records is the part that changes your fireground: blocked exits, occupants who don't know the building, fuel loads past what the sprinklers were designed for.

“Short-term rentals don't fit neatly into how we've traditionally classified occupancies, which means we've been missing a real understanding of the risks tied to them. Flagging these properties lets us see the patterns (what kinds of incidents happen, how often, and under what conditions) so future code updates are grounded in actual data instead of assumptions.”

A flag for interactions with people experiencing homelessness. NERIS already had a location use for unhoused or temporary structures, which works at an encampment. It doesn't cover a medical call on a sidewalk or a welfare check in a vacant storefront. V1.5 adds a flag on the base incident instead of the address, so it can be set on any incident type at any location. Departments have never had a consistent way to count these calls, which matters when you're defending a staffing request.

What Else Is New in NERIS V1.5?

A few more worth knowing about:

• Outside fires can be flagged as an ordinance violation. One record documents the cause and the local policy separately. If you run burn bans, this is how those calls finally get counted as burn ban calls.
• Damage assessment adds two values. Affected means superficial damage, typically 10 percent or less of the structure. Inaccessible covers incidents where the property couldn't be reached for evaluation.
• Arson fire investigator becomes fire and explosion investigator. It's the industry-standard title, and it doesn't presume intent.
• Plug-in solar panels are a new powergen hazard type. They connect straight into a standard household outlet, creating hazards crews haven't had to account for.
• Stations and units get an in-service flag. Close a station for renovation and you set its status to false instead of deleting the record and creating a new ID. The NERIS ID persists.
• Incident analysis picks up a wildland fuel group field. Classifying it takes someone reviewing the incident after the fact, which is why it sits in the analysis layer.

What Should Your Department Do About NERIS Version 1.5?

Nothing is required, which is exactly why this one slips. Here's a reasonable sequence:

1. Ask your RMS vendor when the V1.5 fields go live, if they aren't in your system yet. Get a date, not a quarter. RedAlert customers already have them as of the October 1 release.
2. Pick the handful of new values that matter to your department. A rural department wants agricultural vehicle fires. A coastal department wants the surf and tidal water split.
3. Update your crew guidance before the fields show up. The most common source of NERIS data quality problems is members completing reports the old way out of habit. A single shift briefing covers what changed.
4. Decide who owns the analysis-layer fields. Wildland fuel group and damage assessment take judgment. Name the person who reviews those incidents so the field doesn't sit empty.
5. Flag the split in your year-over-year numbers. When water rescue becomes three types and vehicle fires lose the agricultural calls, your 2027 categories won't line up against 2026. Explain that before the fire board does the math.
6. Build a quarterly habit. More releases are coming. Put a standing item on your agenda to review schema changes with whoever owns reporting.

The departments that get value out of NERIS Version 1.5 won't be the ones that adopt every field. They'll be the ones that pick the few fields describing the calls they actually run, then code them consistently.