About PlainFireData

Why PlainFireData Exists

A homeowner deciding where to live, a researcher measuring fire service capacity, a policymaker spotting coverage gaps, all of them are stuck piecing together the same answer from federal systems built for agency analysts, not the public. HIFLD, USFA, and FEMA each publish real data on fire departments, fire loss, and grant funding, but it lives in three separate formats that assume you already know what an FDID is.

PlainFireData does the joining work once: HIFLD station records, USFA national fire statistics, and FEMA grant history, aggregated into one department profile, one state comparison, one county map per jurisdiction. No sign-up, no paywall, no technical background required to read it. We believe a fire department's numbers, personnel, equipment, call volume, funding, should be as easy to look up as its street address.

PlainFireData provides free access to federal fire department data, profiles of 32,253 departments across all 50 states + DC (3,168 county-equivalent jurisdictions), state-level fire safety statistics, fire cause breakdowns, and county-level coverage maps. All data comes from official US government sources: HIFLD (DHS/CISA), USFA (FEMA), and FEMA OpenFEMA.

Where the Data Comes From

All data comes from federal open-data programs:

• HIFLD Fire Stations (DHS/CISA): Station-level HIFLD records aggregated by FDID into department profiles; our extract currently sums to 36,454 stations across 32,253 departments (personnel, trucks, EMS, FDID).
• USFA National Fire Statistics: State-level fire data from the US Fire Administration, annual fires, fire deaths, injuries, and property loss by state.
• FEMA Assistance to Firefighters Grants (OpenFEMA): Federal grant awards to fire departments, funding amounts, program types, and award history.
• U.S. Census Bureau Population Estimates: State population figures used only to compute department-density and per-capita context on state comparison views.

Methodology

HIFLD data contains one record per fire station, with multiple stations sharing the same Fire Department Identification Number (FDID). We aggregate stations to department profiles using the FDID + state composite key, applying name normalization (stripping station numbers from department names) and selecting the highest available values for personnel and equipment. No data is fabricated, interpolated, or editionalized.

State fire statistics from USFA are hardcoded from published annual reports, which are not available as downloadable datasets from federal APIs.

Data Currency

HIFLD station data is updated periodically by DHS/CISA. USFA state statistics reflect the most recent full year of national fire reporting. We refresh our database when updated federal datasets are released.

Coverage Limitations

Not all fire departments appear in HIFLD data. Smaller volunteer departments may not report to the federal system. Absence from PlainFireData does not mean a community lacks fire protection, it means that department does not appear in the federal station registry. Always contact your local fire department for authoritative local information.

Important Disclaimer

This site is for informational purposes only. Data may not reflect current department staffing or equipment. Do not rely solely on this data for emergency planning or safety decisions. Always follow guidance from local authorities and emergency services. In an emergency, call 911.

Not Affiliated

PlainFireData is not affiliated with DHS, CISA, USFA, FEMA, or any government agency. We are an independent data portal that presents public federal information in a more accessible format.

How We Process Fire Department Data

PlainFireData draws from two federal sources: the Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data (HIFLD) fire station database, which provides locations and department details for over 38,000 fire departments nationwide, and the U.S. Fire Administration state-level statistics covering firefighter counts, fire incidents, and loss data.

We organize this data by county and state so residents can see the departments serving their area along with staffing and response capacity context. Department-level details reflect HIFLD records as published. State fire loss statistics come from USFA reports and are presented without normalization or ranking, we show the numbers and let readers draw their own conclusions about local fire protection capacity.

Editorial Standards

The department, state, and county profiles on PlainFireData are generated by a continuous editorial pipeline that renders every page directly from official federal source data, HIFLD, USFA/NFIRS, FEMA, NIFC, NWCG, and related fire-data programs, so coverage is consistent across all 32,253 departments. The editorial work goes into the pipeline: how data is sourced, joined, and presented, the methodology that governs it, and the written guides and research, not into hand-authoring tens of thousands of near-identical profiles. The PlainFireData editorial process is responsible for that pipeline, the editorial standards and methodology, and corrections. Our written guides and research analyses explain source scope, limitations, and methodology without representing a named human reviewer.

No fire department, state agency, equipment vendor, or firefighters' association pays us for coverage, a better ranking, or a friendlier writeup, none of that is for sale here. The site is funded by ordinary Google AdSense display ads, and advertisers have no input into which departments we cover or how the data is presented.

Every statistic on a department, county, or state page is provenance-tagged to its source dataset (HIFLD, USFA, FEMA AFG, or NIFC), and every research page links to our methodology page where the SQL aggregation logic is documented.

Editorial Process

PlainFireData is published by PlainFireData, an independent public-data reference that makes government fire-service records easier to inspect. Its editorial process documents the source, limitations, and methodology for HIFLD station registries, USFA NFIRS reporting, FEMA AFG grant data, and related federal fire-data releases.

Nobody on this team is a firefighter, and nothing here is fire-suppression tactics or operational guidance, that's not what this site is for. What we can promise is that every number traces back to a named federal record: a department's station count ties to a specific HIFLD entry, a state's fire-death figure ties to a specific USFA annual report. Where the chain has a weak link, NFIRS reporting is voluntary and varies state to state, a department's records lag the real-world count, a field simply isn't collected, we say so next to the number, not in a footnote nobody reads. The full breakdown of how each figure is built lives at /methodology.

Found an error, have a correction, or want to know where a figure came from? Write to hello@plainfiredata.com. Corrections go into the next database refresh, and the "Last updated" date at the top of this page tells you exactly how current the numbers are. There is no version of this site where a department, vendor, or association can pay to change how it's ranked or represented.

Contact

Questions, corrections, or feedback? Email us at hello@plainfiredata.com.

We welcome:

• Questions about data sources or methodology
• Reports of missing departments or incorrect station data
• Suggestions for additional features or data dimensions
• Media and research inquiries

PlainFireData is an independent, public-interest data project. We build free, plain-language tools that make official fire-service data easy to explore.