Occupation / job
Firefighters
Median annual pay. Half earn less than this.
Hourly at a standard 2,080-hour year. We do not yet have unpaid-time or cost data for this, so this is not an adjusted figure.
The middle half. A quarter earn below this range.
Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 · view
What this figure cannot tell you
It covers people EMPLOYED in this occupation. Anyone who trained for it and was never hired is not in the median above, and neither is anyone doing the work self-employed. No verified count of qualified people exists for this occupation, so this page shows none rather than an estimate. Why that matters · The occupations where we could source it
Who this suits
A $59,280 midpoint puts Firefighters $9,260 above the $50,020 typical American job — a 19% premium paid for the training, the licence or the conditions. It is not free money and it disappears the moment you stop meeting the requirement.
This is a large occupation: 345,990 people work as Firefighters. Large occupations hire continuously and replace continuously, and the pay reflects both facts.
Firefighting and prevention suit people who function on long shifts in a crew they live with, and who accept that the training volume is high relative to how often it is used.
No verified preparation time is on file for Firefighters. The wage survey behind every figure on this page asks employers what they pay, not what they required, so the honest answer here is that we do not know.
Who should not do this
The quarters sit at $44,490 and $77,250 — 1.7x, or $2,730 a month apart. At that width the occupation contains genuinely different jobs, and which one you are being offered matters more than the title does.
At $44,490 — $21.38 an hour — the 25th percentile of this field sits essentially at the $50,020 all-occupation midpoint. Being in the bottom quarter of Firefighters still means being paid like the average American worker.
Avoid it if the cumulative exposure worries you — the long-run health record of this work is a real part of the decision.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 345,990 figure counts people already working as Firefighters, not everyone who trained and never got hired. Without a licensing register to divide by, a rate here would be an invented denominator.
What the spread tells you
At 1.7x, the distribution for Firefighters is open enough that specialisation starts to pay. The distance from $44,490 to $77,250 is mostly what you can do that others in the same title cannot.
Put in money rather than ratios: $44,490 at the 25th percentile, $59,280 at the midpoint, $77,250 at the 75th. $32,760 separates the quarter of Firefighters at the bottom from the quarter at the top.
The 75th percentile is $77,250. Reaching it from the $59,280 midpoint is $17,970 a year; reaching it from the $44,490 that the bottom quarter of Firefighters earn is $32,760.
The climb from $59,280 to $77,250 is $17,970; the drop to $44,490 is $14,790. A little more room above the midpoint than below it is the normal shape for Firefighters and for most paid work, and it is the reason the median is the honest summary rather than the average.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $21.38 at the bottom quarter, $28.50 at the midpoint, $37.13 at the top quarter. The typical American job works out at $24.04 on the same basis.
What these figures are, and what they are not
The $59,280 figure is what employers pay employees. It is before tax and before deductions, it excludes the self-employed entirely, and it says nothing about anyone who does this work on their own account.
The hourly number on this page is $59,280 divided by a 2,080-hour year and nothing more. We hold no unpaid-hours or cost data for Firefighters, so it is arithmetic rather than an effective rate.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else