Wildland Firefighter Compensation: Breaking Down a Season's Earnings
I get lots of questions about salary and what to expect money-wise in a fire season so here’s info about base pay and hours, overtime and hazard pay.
Income can vary wildly in a season because it depends on so many factors. Wildland firefighters work a minimum 40-hour work week. Your hourly rate depends on the GS level that you are hired at.
Most people start as a GS-03 or 4 depending on how much school you have or if you were in the military. Current hourly wage for a GS-04 step 1 is $19.62 an hour for base and $29.43 for overtime.
Base and overtime pay are shown here in this chart.
You will be a step one when you are first hired. You only get step increases when you are a permanent employee for multiple seasons, but step increases and GS increases are a whole other article.
Depending on your duty station (where you report for work) you may have an increased “locality pay adjustment” based on the cost of living in that area. This chart it will tell you the hourly rates for the specific places that have higher rates.
When we work overtime we get paid the hourly base pay times 1.5. If we are on a fire where we are working on uncontrolled fireline (which is most of the time) you get an additional hazard pay that is 25% of your base pay. For math purposes if you are making a base wage of $19.62 an hour it adds up much more quickly when you are working overtime at $29.43 an hour plus hazard pay of $4.90 for every hour worked that day.
For example: We work 16 hour days on fires most of the time. For a $19.62 an hour base pay rate that adds up to $156.96 base (8 hours X $19.62) + $235.44 in overtime (8 hours x $29.43) + $78.40 in hazard pay (16 hours x $4.90) for a total of $469.80 a day before taxes.
And there is a new pay option called Incident Response Premium Pay (IRPP) for 2025 that is a daily rate of 4.5x your hourly base pay rate. It applies on qualifying wildfire, prescribed burn, and severity incidents when you are away from your duty station for more than 36 hours.
In the above example, the daily IRPP pay would be $88.29 (4.5 x $19.62) so a total of $558.09 per day ($469.80 + $558.09) before taxes which is WAY more than I got starting out in 2012.
Read this FAQs sheet for more pay info for 2025. It’s all very new and confusing.
Most entry level firefighters count a good fire season as one where they are getting 700 total hours of overtime. I've had years where I only had 500 (for short, slow seasons) and years I've had 1500+. Hotshot crews generally count a good season as one where they break 1000 hours, but the new normal in the past few years is 1200+.
You can see how the monthly and season totals can be really different for all firefighters. A good estimate is that you can make $40,000- $80,000 in a 6ish month fire season depending on what type of crew you are on and how much overtime and time on the fireline time you get.
If you are a student doing a three month season obviously your totals are going to be on the very low end.
There’s a lot of on going federal wildland firefighter pay scale and pay specifics changing in 2025. For the most up to date info on wildland fire pay and all the changes happening within the government check out Grassroots Wildland Firefighters website. It explains everything in great detail and they are working super hard to get us increased pay, benefits, and better work life balance.
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