Top 10 US Fire Departments by AFG/SAFER Grant Funding
Cumulative AFG and SAFER grant funding by fire department across FY2003–2024 (sum of award years, not a single-year snapshot).
Research period:
Research question
Among US fire departments in the HIFLD registry, which have received the largest cumulative AFG/SAFER federal grant funding, and how does funding concentration compare to department personnel size?
Methodology
This ranking sums every recorded AFG/SAFER award in our extract for each department across FY2003–2024. It is a cumulative lifetime total in the extract, not “latest-year funding.” When FEMA publishes additional awards, the cumulative sum and this ranking update on the next ingest.
Coverage and exclusions: entities with no reported value for this metric are left out of the ranking rather than shown as zero, since a missing figure is not the same as an actual zero. Federal Emergency Management Agency occasionally withholds a value for confidentiality, small-sample, or quality-control reasons, and those withheld entries are excluded the same way.
Data provenance: Federal Emergency Management Agency publishes this dataset on its own release schedule, and we pull each new release as it becomes publicly available. If a later release revises a prior figure, the revised number appears here when our data pipeline refreshes the published record.
Editorial governance: PlainFireData documents how rankings are built, how outliers are handled, and how corrections are processed if an entity disputes a figure attributed to it. The organization byline identifies the editorial process responsible for this page. Corrections and clarifications can be requested through the contact channels linked in the site footer.
Transparency: every number on this page traces back to a specific Federal Emergency Management Agency source record, linked from the entity pages reachable from this ranking. See our methodology page for the full source list, update cadence, and how each figure is derived.
See the methodology page for the full source list, update cadence, and how each figure is derived.
Top 10 US Fire Departments by AFG/SAFER Grant Funding
Live data, updated automatically whenever we refresh our copy of the source
The ranked top 10
Every row below is the cumulative AFG/SAFER award total across FY2003–2024 for that department. Refresh after an ingest to pick up newly disclosed awards.
| # | Department | State | Cumulative funding (FY2003–2024) | Grant awards | Personnel |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sacramento Metropolitan Fire District | CA | 49578452.24 | 16 | 0 |
| 2 | City of Los Angeles Fire Department | CA | 49320901.04 | 20 | 0 |
| 3 | Oakland Fire Department | CA | 46273773.29 | 13 | 0 |
| 4 | Fall River Fire Department - Flint Reney/Eastwood Station | MA | 31921864.36 | 8 | 0 |
| 5 | Contra Costa County Fire Protection District | CA | 30121879.17 | 15 | 0 |
| 6 | Worcester Fire Department - Brown Square Fire Station | MA | 29749853.95 | 10 | 0 |
| 7 | City of Reno Fire Department | NV | 27197894.04 | 9 | 0 |
| 8 | Akron Fire Department | OH | 26547487.38 | 14 | 420 |
| 9 | City of Miami Department of Fire-Rescue | FL | 22762974.71 | 14 | 681 |
| 10 | East Newark Volunteer Fire Department | NJ | 21997337 | 4 | 24 |
Source: Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA AFG/SAFER Grant Awards (cumulative FY2003–2024).
Findings
Top entity in the ranking
The top-ranked record in this dataset is Sacramento Metropolitan Fire District, with cumulative funding of 49578452.24 across FY2003–2024. The full top-10 set is rendered in the table above. Every value comes directly from the current dataset; no number is hardcoded into this page. When the Federal Emergency Management Agency publishes a revision, the ranking and the prose around it update the next time we refresh our copy of the data.
Distribution shape
The gap between the top-ranked record (49578452.24) and the 10th-ranked record (21997337) characterizes how concentrated the top of the distribution is. Where the top value is many multiples of the median value of the visible set, the population is highly concentrated, a small number of entities accumulate the bulk of the measured quantity. Where the top and bottom of the visible set are close together, the distribution is relatively flat across the top end. The full distribution beyond this top-10 cut is summarized in the aggregate context section below and explored in the linked entity profiles.
Aggregate context
Across the full population behind this ranking, here are the summary statistics: how many records exist in total, the sum of the ranking metric across all qualifying records, and the mean per-record value. The methodology page documents the exact filter applied (records with null or zero values on the ranking metric are excluded). This aggregate row is computed from the same dataset that powers the ranking above.
Source provenance
The records in this ranking originate from Federal Emergency Management Agency, specifically the FEMA AFG/SAFER Grant Awards. PlainFireData sums every recorded award year in the extract (FY2003–2024) into each department’s cumulative total, that sum is a different population from HIFLD registry fields and from USFA annual fire statistics. The methodology page documents the source URL, the FY span, and how each figure is derived.
Why this ranking matters
Rankings like this one let a reader scan a population quickly and identify outliers, concentrations, and patterns that warrant deeper investigation. The detail pages linked from each entity in the table above give the full per-entity context: time-series history where available, related metrics from adjacent tables, and links onward to the underlying source records. The methodology page explains how an entity earns inclusion in the dataset and how the ranking column is computed at the source.
What this analysis cannot tell us
AFG and SAFER are separate FEMA programs with different eligibility and award formulas, combining them into a single 'total grant funding' column obscures program-specific differences in award size and frequency. Totals are cumulative across FY2003–2024 - they are not “latest-year” awards. Grant awards reflect competitive applications; departments that do not apply do not appear in the top of the ranking, regardless of need. Multi-year grants are captured at award date, not disbursement schedule, so the funding totals reflect commitments rather than year-by-year cash flow. Some grant awards flow to regional or county-level coordinating bodies on behalf of multiple departments, those appear as a single line item rather than distributed across the participating departments. Department-FDID matching across grant records and the HIFLD registry can be imperfect for departments that have undergone consolidation or renaming.
Secondary cut from the same source
Top 10 departments by raw grant-award count (uncalibrated for dollar size)
Sources
- FEMA Assistance to Firefighters Grant Program - https://www.fema.gov/grants/preparedness/firefighters
- FEMA Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response (SAFER) - https://www.fema.gov/grants/preparedness/firefighters/safer