HIFLD · USFA · June 2026
Key findings from PlainFireData's federal fire registry and state incident tables. Counts describe what this archive lists, not how many firefighters a community should employ.
PlainFireData registry
38,518 US fire departments are cataloged here with 1,024,831 personnel; California leads reported annual fires (168,000) and 86.9% of typed departments are volunteer. Registry summaries, not staffing advice.
- 38,518
- departments
- 1,024,831
- personnel
- 168,000
- CA fires
- 86.9%
- volunteer share
According to HIFLD fire station records and USFA state tables compiled in PlainFireData. See methodology for source links and listable-department filters.
According to HIFLD and USFA records compiled here, PlainFireData lists 38,518 departments across 55 states with operational fields in this rebuild loaded June 2026. Each finding below is recomputed from the live database. Read the methodology for FDID aggregation, ranking filters, and vintage dates.
Key findings
Standalone, citable statements from this fire registry. Reuse with attribution to PlainFireData.
- 38,518 fire department profiles are in this PlainFireData HIFLD extract after FDID aggregation (40,880 station rows summed into department records). Each profile links to staffing, apparatus, and grant fields when present in the source.
- 1,024,831 personnel are summed across those department rows in this snapshot (3,168 counties and 55 states with at least one listed department). Totals include training-facility rows filtered out of public rankings but still present in the raw registry.
- 86.9% of departments with a normalized career, volunteer, or combination type label are volunteer (20,711 of 23,825 typed rows; 2,907 career, 207 combination). Rows labeled other in HIFLD are excluded from this share.
- 1,848,900 annual fires are summed from USFA state-level tables in this extract (51 states report a positive annual_fires value). State totals are reported incident volumes, not a census of every local call.
- 168,000 California leads on summed annual fires in this extract (162,000 in Texas is second). Ordering matches the most-incidents-by-state ranking page.
- 6,545 Baltimore County Fire Department reports the highest total personnel in this extract (MD); Houston Fire Department (TX) is second at 3,815. Largest-departments rankings apply the same listable-department filter documented in methodology.
- 3,645 fire deaths and 16,648 injuries are summed from the same USFA state tables in this snapshot. These are reported state totals, not per-department fatality rates.
- 49% Cooking is listed as the largest share of home fires in the USFA cause table bundled here (Heating Equipment is second at 15%). Percentages describe national cause distribution in USFA educational material, not this registry's incident log.
Registry distribution
State fire volumes and department-type counts mirror the rankings hub; bars use the same tables as /rankings/.
Source: HIFLD Open Fire Stations and US Fire Administration state tables PlainFireData department and state registry · 2026 Personnel and fire totals reflect the extract snapshot at last rebuild. State fire sums are reported volumes, not local call logs.
How to read these numbers
Department counts are FDID-aggregated HIFLD rows, not a complete census of every station in the country. State fire totals come from USFA tables bundled with this portal. Download the department-level CSV or open rankings, state pages, and the data-reading guide for drill-downs.
Every staffing, station, grant, and fire-incident figure on PlainFireData is rendered from HIFLD (DHS/CISA), USFA, and FEMA AFG public records, no number is typed in by an editor. Key Findings aggregate getTotalStats, getNationalFireAggregates, getAllStates, getTopDepartmentsByPersonnel, and getFireCauses from the PlainFireData SQLite catalog. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error. Data current as of June 2026.