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US Fire Department Comparison
A free dataset from The Basin  ·  basin.la/data/index.html#us-fire-department-comparison
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The full method, the column definitions and the known limits are written up and
available on request: data@basin.la

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ABOUT THIS DATASET
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US FIRE DEPARTMENT COMPARISON PANEL
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Fifteen fire departments on one set of definitions: what each is appropriated, how many uniformed
firefighters and stations it has, how many calls it answers, how many of those calls are medical,
and whether it takes patients to hospital itself. Ten large city departments, four Los Angeles
County city departments, and the Los Angeles County fire district.

Every budget figure comes from the government's own adopted budget for the fiscal year containing
1 January 2026. Population comes from the Census Bureau's Vintage 2025 estimates and land area
from the Census Bureau's 2025 Gazetteer, land only. Station counts, incident counts and EMS
arrangements come from the budget document or from the department's own annual report or
statistical summary. Nothing is from an aggregator or an encyclopedia.


WHAT IS IN THE RELEASE
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| File | Rows | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| fire_panel.csv | 15 | One row per department: budget, staffing, stations, calls, EMS model, denominators, derived ratios |
| agency_budget_notes.csv | 15 | Per department: what the appropriation includes and excludes, the verifier's findings, and every source with a page locator |
| denominators.csv | 16 | Population and land area for every jurisdiction |


TWO THINGS THAT DECIDE WHETHER A COMPARISON IS HONEST
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Does the department transport patients? This is the largest single driver of what a fire
department costs, and it splits the panel four ways. Eleven departments run their own ambulances
and take patients to hospital outright. Seattle transports advanced life support patients and
Santa Monica runs an in-house basic life support ambulance, both contracting out the rest. San
Diego Fire-Rescue contracts its operator but is provider of record under its regional alliance and
books a $137.2 million ambulance transport enterprise inside its own fire appropriation. Only Los
Angeles County Fire hands transport away entirely.

A department that transports buys and staffs ambulances, employs paramedics, and counts those runs
as its own incidents. Comparing cost per resident or calls per firefighter across that line
compares different services. ems_model carries the flag on every row.

This is also the field most likely to be got wrong, because it is stated in prose rather than in
a budget table. Both Seattle and Santa Monica were filed as first-response-only until an
independent check found Seattle's annual report counting 5,600 advanced life support transports
in 2025 and Santa Monica operating department ambulances alongside a contracted basic transport
service. Where a verifier corrected the model, the corrected value is what ships.

Is pension inside the line? Six of the fifteen appropriate firefighter pension outside the
fire department's budget, or only partly inside: Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Philadelphia
fully outside, Phoenix and Seattle partly. The other nine carry it inside. On the published
figures Los Angeles looks like the cheapest large fire department in the panel at $232 per
resident, and that is an artifact. Unlike the police side, we could not repair it: Los Angeles
appropriates fire and police pensions together in one Fire and Police Pension Fund line of
$633,415,607 that the budget does not split by department, so no honest loaded LAFD figure exists
in the source. pension_inside_line and health_fringe_inside_line mark every row, and the
like-for-like comparison is the nine departments where both are inside.


WHAT A FIRE DEPARTMENT ACTUALLY DOES
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Between 67.8 and 87.6 percent of calls are medical rather than fire across the fourteen of
fifteen departments that publish the split. Chicago does not publish one and is absent from any
EMS-share comparison. Not one of the fourteen is below two thirds. annual_incidents is therefore the workload denominator
throughout rather than any fire count, and ems_share_of_incidents_pct is reported where the
department publishes it. Note that a department which does not transport will record fewer
incidents for the same population, which is another reason the EMS flag gates every workload
comparison.


COUNTY DEPARTMENT
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Los Angeles County Fire is the Consolidated Fire Protection District, a special district with its
own property tax share, not a county general fund department. Its denominators are the service
area the district itself reports, 2,311 square miles and about 3.98 million residents, not any
city boundary and not the whole county. Its appropriation also funds services no city fire
department funds: ocean lifeguards at $72.8 million and 295 positions, the county hazardous
materials regulatory program at $30.9 million, the duties of the Forester and Fire Warden, a
federal urban search and rescue task force and a wildland camp operation. It carries
comparable_to_city_fd = 0.

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TERMS: SOURCES AND RIGHTS
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LICENSING TERMS
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The underlying records are public. City and county adopted budgets are public records. Census
Bureau Vintage 2025 population estimates and 2025 Gazetteer land areas are US government works.
Each department's annual report or statistical summary is the public record of the government
that wrote it. None of that is ours and none of it is licensed here.

What is licensed here is the assembled product: the panel, the joins between four separate
sources, the EMS-model and pension flags that decide which figures may be compared with which, the
per-agency notes on what each appropriation contains, and the documented method. Attribution to The Basin is required in any published use.

Two things a licensee should not do with this data. Do not rank departments on the published
budget line without saying that six of the fifteen appropriate firefighter pension outside it, or
only partly inside.
Do not compare fire departments on cost without saying which of them transport patients to
hospital themselves and which leave that to a private ambulance company.

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LICENCE
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Free to use, including commercially, with attribution.

    Data processing: The Basin (basin.la)

The records underneath this release are public. Federal figures are US government
works and municipal filings are public records; none of that is ours and none of
it is licensed here. What The Basin built is the assembly: the extraction, the
joins, the derived measures and the documentation. That work is given away with
this release rather than licensed, and you may redistribute it, including as part
of a commercial product, provided the attribution above travels with it.

If a source carries its own attribution requirement, that requirement survives
this grant. The source table is under "Terms" above.

No warranty. The full method and the known limits are available on request:
data@basin.la

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The Basin  ·  basin.la  ·  data@basin.la
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