Firefighter Deaths per Year in the U.S., 2000 to 2025: Causes, Ages and State Rates

This month in brief

• The USFA database lists 2,635 on-duty firefighter deaths from 2000 to 2025 once the 346 World Trade Center deaths of September 11, 2001 are set aside, an average of 101.3 a year.
• Annual deaths fell from an average of 114.8 in 2000 to 2004 to 80.0 a year in 2020 to 2024 once COVID-19 deaths are removed, a decline of 30.3%.
• Stress or overexertion remains the leading cause: 47.3% of deaths in 2000 to 2009, 54.9% in 2010 to 2019 and 53.2% of non-COVID deaths in 2020 to 2025.
• Traumatic fireground deaths have shrunk as a share: struck-by deaths fell from 15.2% to 7.8% and caught, trapped, lost or out-of-air deaths from 11.2% to 6.0% between the 2000s and 2020 to 2025.
• Volunteers made up 52.9% of deaths in 2000 to 2009 but 42.4% in 2020 to 2025, while the career share rose from 38.6% to 45.8%.
• The fallen are older: median age at death rose from 46 in the 2000s to 51 in 2020 to 2025, and 15.5% of recent deaths were firefighters aged 66 or older.
• Across the 50 states and DC, 854 non-wildland deaths from 2016 to 2025 equal 8.0 deaths a year per 100,000 registered firefighters, with wide state spread on small counts.

Firefighter deaths per year, 2000 to 2025

Excluding the September 11 losses, on-duty deaths ran above 100 a year through 2008, settled near 90 in the 2010s, spiked with COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021, and returned to the 70s and 80s in 2024 and 2025.

The USFA fatality database holds 2,635 on-duty deaths dated from 2000 to 2025 after the 346 September 11 World Trade Center deaths are set aside. That is an average of 101.3 deaths a year, but the average hides a clear step down: 114.8 a year in 2000 to 2004 against 80.0 a year in 2020 to 2024 once COVID-19 deaths are removed.

The single lowest year was 2019, with 64 deaths. The highest non-9/11 year was 2021, with 141 deaths, of which 63 were COVID-19 deaths that fire departments attributed to on-duty exposure. USFA began counting such deaths in 2020 (USFA 2024 report).

Year totals here follow the year of death. USFA switched to that rule in its 2020 report and recalculated earlier years; before that, each annual report counted deaths by the year of the injury. A death can therefore move between years, and 88 of the 2,635 deaths since 2000 came in a later calendar year than the injury.

The September 11 losses, counted separately

The 2001 attack on the World Trade Center is the largest loss of firefighters in a single incident in U.S. history. Including it would flatten every trend line, so we show it on its own.

USFA's 2001 report says the Fire Department City of New York lost 343 members on September 11, 2001, two of them EMS workers without firefighting duties, and its study counted the 341 firefighting members. The current database holds 346 records with a 9/11/2001 incident date in New York: 345 list FDNY as the department (3 of them building fire safety directors classified as industrial) and one is a volunteer from another New York department.

With those records included, the database shows 459 deaths dated in 2001; without them, 2001 had 113 on-duty deaths, in line with neighbouring years. Later deaths from World Trade Center related illnesses, such as cancers, are generally not in the USFA count: USFA says it has no established mechanism to identify deaths from long-term illnesses that develop over many years. The National Fallen Firefighters Foundation, by contrast, honors cancer deaths that meet a state presumption law (see the section on why counts differ).

How the cause mix shifted since 2000

Medical deaths triggered by physical and mental strain have dominated for 26 years. What has shrunk is traumatic death on the fireground: firefighters struck by objects, trapped or lost inside buildings.

Stress or overexertion, USFA's label for deaths where physical work or psychological stress triggers a medical event, caused 47.3% of deaths in 2000 to 2009 and 54.9% in 2010 to 2019. In 2020 to 2025 its share fell to 43.6%, but only because COVID-19 exposure deaths swelled the denominator: excluding COVID-19, stress or overexertion was 53.2% of deaths.

Struck-by and contact deaths fell from 15.2% to 7.8% of deaths between 2000 to 2009 and 2020 to 2025. Deaths from being caught, trapped, lost or running out of air fell from 11.2% to 6.0%. Vehicle collisions, which in USFA coding include aircraft crashes, did not move: 13.7%, 12.9% and 14.1% across the three periods.

Cause and nature are different fields. Cause is the action or circumstance (stress, collision, collapse); nature is the medical diagnosis (heart attack, trauma, asphyxiation). Heart attack or stroke was the nature of 47.2% of deaths in 2000 to 2009, 53.8% in 2010 to 2019 and 51.4% of non-COVID deaths in 2020 to 2025.

Deaths at building fires, measured as on-scene fire duty at residential, commercial, industrial, public and institutional properties, were 22.0% of deaths in 2000 to 2009, 18.1% in 2010 to 2019 and 19.8% in 2020 to 2025. Deaths while responding to or returning from calls dropped from 19.1% to 13.8%, and training deaths held near one in ten (11.0%, 9.6% and 9.5%). City-level response time data from incident records is in our fire department response times report.

Volunteer, career and wildland firefighter deaths

Volunteers still account for a large share of deaths, but the balance has tilted toward career firefighters since 2020.

Volunteers were 52.9% of on-duty deaths in 2000 to 2009 and 50.7% in 2010 to 2019, then 42.4% in 2020 to 2025. Career firefighters moved the other way, from 38.6% and 35.0% to 45.8%. Part of the recent career share is COVID-19: 72 of the 106 COVID-19 deaths were career firefighters, and 49 were coded to EMS or patient care, which is why that activity rose from 2.0% of deaths in the 2000s to 14.5% in 2020 to 2025.

Wildland agency firefighters (federal, state and contract crews) were 5.5% of deaths in 2000 to 2009, 9.2% in 2010 to 2019 and 6.8% in 2020 to 2025. Part-time and paid-on-call firefighters rose from 2.4% to 4.9%. For the size of each workforce by state, see our fire departments by state report, which counts career, volunteer and paid-per-call firefighters in the USFA registry.

Firefighters who die on duty are older than in 2000

The median age at death rose by five years, and the share of deaths among firefighters in their late 50s, 60s and 70s grew in every period.

The median age at death was 46 in 2000 to 2009, 49 in 2010 to 2019 and 51 in 2020 to 2025. Firefighters aged 50 or older were 39.3%, 49.7% and 53.4% of deaths with a known age. Those aged 66 or older rose from 9.2% to 15.5% of deaths, while those 25 or younger fell from 10.5% to 6.1%.

Age and cause are linked: heart attacks and strokes concentrate in older members. The database cannot say whether the workforce itself aged by the same amount, because no national roster of firefighter ages exists in the sources we used.

What firefighters were doing when fatally injured

Fire attack is the most common named activity, but a fifth of deaths are coded 'Other', and many medical deaths begin away from the scene.

Advancing hose lines or fire attack accounted for 15.0% of deaths from 2000 to 2025; the most common cause group within it was caught, trapped, lost or out of air. Driving or operating apparatus accounted for 7.9% and driving or riding in a personal vehicle for 5.8%; collisions were the leading cause in both. In-station duties (6.5%) and fitness activity (2.8%) were dominated by stress or overexertion.

Coding changed over the period. 'Other' is 19.2% of all deaths, 'Not On Scene' (8.0%) belongs almost entirely to 2013 to 2019, and USFA notes that before 2018 Hometown Heroes deaths were mostly coded with duty 'after' the incident, while from 2018 they carry the duty during which the strenuous activity took place. Activity shares are best read as broad patterns.

State rates per 100,000 registered firefighters

Raw state counts track the size of each fire service. Dividing by registered firefighters gives a rough exposure-adjusted rate, with large caveats.

From 2016 to 2025, 854 non-wildland firefighters in the 50 states and DC died on duty. The USFA National Fire Department Registry's final June 2026 file lists 1,065,565 career, volunteer and paid-per-call firefighters in those states, which gives 8.0 deaths a year per 100,000 registered firefighters.

Delaware (19.8), West Virginia (15.7) and Hawaii (15.5) have the highest rates, but on 8, 17 and 4 deaths. Among states with at least 30 deaths, Missouri (13.8), New Jersey (11.9) and Texas (11.3) stand out, while New York, with 60 deaths and 98,331 registered firefighters, sits at 6.1. The registry is voluntary and covered about 92% of estimated departments in January 2024, and its member counts are self-reported, so a state with low registration will show an inflated rate. Wildland agency deaths (64 in this window) are left out because crews are often recorded under a home unit far from the fire.

These are firefighter deaths, not civilian deaths. Civilian fire death rates by state are in our fire deaths by state report.

2025 against the ten-year average

2025 was below the 2015 to 2024 average on total deaths, but almost exactly on the non-COVID baseline, with heart attack and stroke deaths above average.

The 81 provisional deaths of 2025 are 13.0% below the 2015 to 2024 average of 93.1. Most of that gap is COVID-19: against the non-COVID average of 82.5, 2025 was 1.8% lower. Heart attack or stroke deaths (48) were 12.4% above their ten-year average of 42.7, while caught, trapped, lost, out-of-air and collapse deaths (5) were 42.5% below their average of 8.7.

USFA's own provisional 2025 breakdown lists 33 career, 39 volunteer, 4 wildland and 5 part-time firefighters. Our count of the same records gives 34 career and 3 wildland, a one-record difference in classification that is typical of provisional data.

Why USFA, NFPA, NFFF and BLS counts differ

Four federal and national bodies publish firefighter death counts, and for 2024 they range from 26 to 72. The differences come from rules on heart attacks, illness, year assignment and who counts as a firefighter.

USFA on-duty fatality: Any fatal injury or illness sustained while performing official duties, including heart attacks or strokes within 24 hours of an emergency response or training, counted in the year of death. Commuting deaths are excluded, and long-term illnesses such as cancer are not tracked (USFA 2024 report, Appendix B).

Hometown Heroes Survivors Benefits Act of 2003: Public Law 108-182 presumes a fatal heart attack or stroke is a line-of-duty death for federal survivor benefits if it follows nonroutine stressful or strenuous duty or training within 24 hours (P.L. 108-182). USFA has applied the same window since December 15, 2003; it counted 18 such deaths in 2024 and 19 in 2023. Benefits themselves are handled by the Justice Department's Public Safety Officers' Benefits program.

NFPA counted 62 on-duty deaths for 2024 under its own rules (50 states and DC, deaths assigned to the injury year), according to the comparison in the USFA 2024 report. The National Fallen Firefighters Foundation honored 140 firefighters at its May 2025 memorial: 70 whose deaths occurred in 2024, 15 of them from cancer, and 70 from earlier years, 40 of them from cancer. NFFF admits cancer deaths that meet a home-state presumption law, for deaths on or after January 1, 2018 (NFFF criteria).

The BLS Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries recorded 26 fatal injuries in the occupation 'Firefighters' in 2024 (CFOI Table A-5), 36.1% of the USFA count. CFOI covers injuries to all workers, excludes fatal illnesses not caused by an acute exposure (BLS Handbook of Methods), and codes each person by occupation, while USFA counts anyone with fire suppression duties, including volunteers whose day job is something else. The 46-death gap is close to the 43 heart attack or stroke deaths in the 2024 USFA data. Our workplace fire and explosion deaths report uses CFOI to count all workers killed by fires and explosions, which is a different question from this one.

Firefighter injuries reported to NFIRS, 2020 to 2025

Deaths are the tip of the injury record. NFIRS shows more than a thousand lost-time firefighter injuries a year at fire and hazmat incidents alone, but it is voluntary and changing systems.

The NFIRS Fire and Hazmat Public Data Release holds 8,922 firefighter casualty records for 2020 and 11,367 for 2024, of which 1,316 and 1,422 were lost-time injuries (severity 4 to 6). The file records only 14 deaths for 2024, 19.4% of the USFA count, which shows why NFIRS cannot be used to count firefighter deaths. Career status is blank on 28.9% of 2024 records.

The 2024 and 2025 jumps in total records came from severity 1 to 3 entries (report only, first aid or physician treated), while lost-time records fell to 1,157 in 2025. USFA's release notes say NFIRS is not a census, that fewer departments reported in 2025 (21,366) than in 2024 (22,582), and that NFIRS was decommissioned in February 2026 in favor of NERIS. Treat these as injuries reported to NFIRS, not national totals, and do not compare 2025 with earlier years.

Momentum and share analysis

Download the calculations (CSV)

Findings to track

1. 81 U.S. firefighters died on duty in 2025 (provisional), 13.0% below the 2015 to 2024 average of 93.1 deaths a year.^[1][3]
2. Excluding COVID-19, the 2015 to 2024 average was 82.5 deaths a year, so 2025 was 1.8% below the non-COVID baseline: essentially flat.^[1]
3. The lowest year from 2000 to 2025 was 2019 with 64 deaths; the highest non-9/11 year was 2021 with 141, including 63 COVID-19 deaths.^[1]
4. COVID-19 accounted for 106 on-duty firefighter deaths from 2020 to 2023 in the USFA database (36 in 2020, 63 in 2021, 6 in 2022, 1 in 2023).^[1][4]
5. Heart attack or stroke was the medical nature of 51.4% of non-COVID deaths from 2020 to 2025, up from 47.2% of all deaths in 2000 to 2009.^[1]
6. Vehicle collisions (including aircraft) held steady at 13.7%, 12.9% and 14.1% of deaths across 2000 to 2009, 2010 to 2019 and 2020 to 2025.^[1]
7. Deaths while responding to or returning from incidents fell from 19.1% of deaths in 2000 to 2009 to 13.8% in 2020 to 2025.^[1]
8. Deaths at building fires (on-scene fire duty at residential, commercial, industrial and institutional properties) were 22.0% of deaths in 2000 to 2009 and 19.8% in 2020 to 2025.^[1]
9. Wildland agency firefighters accounted for 9.2% of deaths in 2010 to 2019 and 6.8% in 2020 to 2025.^[1]
10. Firefighters aged 50 or older were 53.4% of deaths with a known age in 2020 to 2025, up from 39.3% in 2000 to 2009.^[1]
11. Advancing hose lines or fire attack was the most common named activity at the time of fatal injury from 2000 to 2025, at 15.0% of deaths.^[1]
12. Delaware (19.8), West Virginia (15.7) and Hawaii (15.5) had the highest annual non-wildland death rates per 100,000 registered firefighters from 2016 to 2025, each on 17 or fewer deaths.^[1][15]
13. For 2024, USFA counted 72 on-duty deaths, NFPA counted 62 and the BLS Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries counted 26 fatal injuries among firefighters.^[4][17]
14. Counts grow after first publication: USFA's 2000 report listed 102 deaths, while the database now holds 114 deaths dated in 2000.^[1][11]

Frequently asked questions

Related guides, services and research

• Fire departments by state
• Workplace fire and explosion deaths
• Fire department response times
• Hotel Fire Safety Compliance
• Industrial fires and explosions investigated by the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, 1998 to 2026
• Lithium-Ion Battery Fires Statistics
• Most Common Fire Code Violations

Methodology

Selection: the primary dataset is the U.S. Fire Administration's Firefighter Fatalities in the United States database, downloaded in full on 2026-11-01 from the app's official CSV export (4,058 records, deaths from 1990-01-01 to 2026-10-25). The JSON search API returns the same total (4,058). The export does not escape quotation marks inside fields, so a standard CSV reader fails; our parser (scripts/parse_usfa.py) splits each record on the field separator, rejoins summaries that contain line breaks, and parsed every record with 22 fields. Names, addresses and narrative summaries are dropped before analysis and never shown.

Inclusion rules: all records are counted by year of death, USFA's method since its 2020 report. The 346 records with a 9/11/2001 incident date in New York are excluded from every trend, share, average and state rate and reported separately. COVID-19 deaths (nature of fatal injury 'Covid-19') are kept in totals and shown separately so readers can use either baseline. 2025 is provisional per USFA; 2026 is year to date and used only in the recency notes.

Definitions: USFA counts deaths of anyone with assigned fire suppression duties in organized fire departments, including career, volunteer, wildland, contract, military and industrial brigade firefighters, in the 50 states, DC and the territories. Heart attacks and strokes count when they occur on duty or within 24 hours of an emergency response or training (since December 15, 2003). Long-term illnesses such as cancer are not tracked by USFA. Cause groups, classification groups, age bands and the building fireground measure are Fire Life and Safety groupings of USFA codes, documented in scripts/compute.py.

Conflicts: our counts match USFA's published totals for 2016, 2017 and 2020 to 2025 and differ by one death in 2018 (86 against 85) and 2019 (64 against 65), likely date-of-death edits after USFA's chart was built. USFA annual reports published before 2020 used the injury year and are lower than today's database for those years (102 against 114 for 2000). NFPA, NFFF and BLS CFOI counts are shown only for comparison and never mixed into our calculations.

State rates: deaths are assigned to the department's state. Wildland agency classifications are excluded from the state rate. Denominators are the sum of career, volunteer and paid-per-call firefighters in the USFA National Fire Department Registry national download (June 2026 final file, 27,117 departments), summed by headquarters state; the same figures appear in our fire departments by state report. The registry is voluntary, self-reported and may double count in Georgia, Maryland, Nevada and Virginia.

NFIRS: the shared NFIRS DuckDB was not yet built on 2026-11-01, so firefighter casualty counts were aggregated directly from the official ffcasualty.txt files of the 2020 to 2025 Fire and Hazardous Materials Public Data Release (scripts/nfirs_ffcasualty.py). NFIRS is voluntary and not a census; 2025 reflects the transition to NERIS. Counts are reported as records reported to NFIRS, not national totals, and the blank share is shown for each field used.

Limitations: fields such as activity and property type changed codes over time and contain 'Other' or blank values; recent years can still gain records; state rates rest on small counts. Not legal or benefits advice: eligibility for PSOB or state benefits is decided by the agencies named, not by these counts.

Last update: 2026-11-01. All derived values can be reproduced by running scripts/parse_usfa.py, scripts/compute.py and scripts/nfirs_ffcasualty.py.

This report presents published data with its limitations. It is not legal, engineering, financial or investment advice. Requirements depend on the code edition your state and local fire marshal have adopted; confirm with your authority having jurisdiction.

Sources, ranked by quality

Tier 1: primary and official sources (18)

• [1] U.S. Fire Administration (FEMA). Firefighter Fatalities in the United States database, CSV export (4,058 records, deaths through 2026-10-25). 1990 to 2026-10-25. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [2] U.S. Fire Administration (FEMA). Firefighter Fatalities database lookup tables (causes, activity types, classifications, duty types). current codes. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [3] U.S. Fire Administration. Annual Report on Firefighter Fatalities in the United States (2025 provisional figures). 2016 to 2025. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [4] U.S. Fire Administration. Firefighter Fatalities in the United States in 2024. 2024. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [5] U.S. Fire Administration. Firefighter Fatalities in the United States in 2023. 2023. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [6] U.S. Fire Administration. Firefighter Fatalities in the United States in 2022. 2022. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [7] U.S. Fire Administration. Firefighter Fatalities in the United States in 2021. 2021. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [8] U.S. Fire Administration. Firefighter Fatalities in the United States in 2020. 2020. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [9] U.S. Fire Administration. Firefighter Fatalities in the United States in 2010. 2010. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [10] U.S. Fire Administration. Firefighter Fatalities in the United States in 2001. 2001. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [11] U.S. Fire Administration. Firefighter Fatalities in the United States in 2000. 2000. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [12] U.S. Government Publishing Office. Public Law 108-182, Hometown Heroes Survivors Benefits Act of 2003. enacted 2003-12-15. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [13] Bureau of Justice Assistance, U.S. Department of Justice. Public Safety Officers' Benefits Program. current. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [15] U.S. Fire Administration. National Fire Department Registry, national download file (27,117 departments). June 2026 final file. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [16] U.S. Fire Administration. National Fire Department Registry Summary, January 2024. January 2024. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [17] U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. CFOI Table A-5: Fatal occupational injuries by occupation and event or exposure, 2024. 2024. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [18] U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Handbook of Methods: Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, Concepts. current. Accessed 2026-11-01.
• [19] FEMA / U.S. Fire Administration. FEMA/USFA NFIRS Annual Data: Fire and Hazardous Materials Public Data Release 2020 to 2025 (ffcasualty file and release notes). 2020 to 2025 (2025 released 2026-05-01). Accessed 2026-11-01.

Tier 2: trade bodies, market research, company data (1)

• [14] National Fallen Firefighters Foundation. Criteria for Inclusion on the National Memorial. current. Accessed 2026-11-01.

Tier 3: journalism and expert commentary (1)

• [20] FireRescue1. USFA report: 82 firefighters died in the line of duty in 2018. 2018. Accessed 2026-11-01.