Firefighters Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Firefighters offer sit among all 332,240 workers doing this job? The survey top-codes at $239,200+ and withholds unreliable cells, shown as n/p in the table.

Employment and concentration

BLS counted 332,240 Firefighters jobs in May 2024, which is 0.22% of all U.S. employment in the survey. Work is most concentrated in New Hampshire, where the location quotient is 1.95, meaning the occupation holds 1.95 times its national share of local jobs. Texas employs the most people outright, 30,400 of them, and the three largest state employers together account for 23.9% of the national total.

Read the ladder as a career path in numbers: $44,180 at the 25th percentile, $59,530 at the middle, $77,410 at the 75th. The full 10-to-90 range runs $66,840, a ratio of 2.9 to 1. Where a specific job offer lands on that range says more about the role's level than the occupation's headline median does.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 50 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Washington at $93,490; the jobs leader is Texas:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Firefighters stands number 111 by employment and number 416 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Protective Service Occupations, the group median wage is $58,610 across 24 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 2% more than its group median, and it supplies 9.1% of the group's 3,654,920 jobs. In 19 of the 50 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $59,530, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 15,770 jobs, 4.7% of the national total. Below, the biggest employers come first; the pay table after it only counts metros with 500 or more jobs in the occupation, so its leader is a real market and not a statistical artifact.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Jackson, MS posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $33,930 a year, against $142,380 in San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA. Anyone relocating for this work should price the destination metro's table row, not the national median, before signing anything.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Firefighters paycheck, gross, is $2,290 every two weeks on an annual $59,530, which is $4,961 a month and $1,145 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($44,180) to the 75th ($77,410) is worth $33,230 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Gross is a starting point, not a budget: the paycheck calculator nets it down by state, an offer comparison lives in the salary calculator, and the raise vs inflation calculator separates a real raise from a nominal one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $65,483 would sit between the median ($59,530) and the 75th percentile ($77,410), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $44,180, is $15,350 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Protective Service Occupations

Sibling occupations in Protective Service Occupations: Correctional Officers and Jailers, First-Line Supervisors of Police and Detectives, Lifeguards, Ski Patrol, and Other Recreational Protective Service Workers, Detectives and Criminal Investigators, First-Line Supervisors of Firefighting and Prevention Workers, Crossing Guards and Flaggers. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.