The U.S. Office of Personnel Management recently released new local pay scales for the nation’s wildland firefighters after lawmakers passed the Wildland Firefighter Payment Protection Act last month.
Lawmakers passed the act as part of the 2025 Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act when they narrowly avoided a government shutdown on March 14. The act increases wildland firefighters’ special hourly base rates depending on an employee’s GS, or General Schedule, level. The increases include:
- GS–1, 42 percent
- GS–2, 39 percent
- GS–3, 36 percent
- GS–4, 33 percent
- GS–5, 30 percent
- GS–6, 27 percent
- GS–7, 24 percent
- GS–8, 21 percent
- GS–9, 18 percent
- GS–10, 15 percent
- GS–11, 12 percent
- GS–12, 9 percent
- GS–13, 6 percent
- GS–14, 3 percent
- GS–15, 1.5 percent
The act also required firefighters to receive premium pay for instances when they’re deployed to wildfires. The daily pay is equal to 450% of one hour’s wages when they’re responding to an incident outside of their official duties or assigned to a separate fire camp.
The new OPM pay tables show how those increases break down by locality throughout the nation. Click here to see the new pay tables.
Hunter,
Thank You for sharing. Fair pay seems to be an ongoing uphill battle for wildland fire fighters across the nation. Much is said in the rumor mill which I will try to avoid stepping into. However, from what I’ve heard and seen wildland fire fighters have been historically underpaid for the amount of work they do.
Being on the municipal side and coming from a hand crew I am grateful for the hard work put in and the collaborative effort I’ve seen and encountered on wildfires. Especially in one of the most recent strike teams I was sent out on. The effort put in by all agencies saved my town of Big Bear Lake. I’m grateful to have been a part of such an outstanding effort put in by all firefighters.
Thanks for all You do and for raising awareness. I hope the increases that were fought for are lasting and not temporary as in years past. Keep up the great work, I’ve enjoyed reading your content.
Kindly,
-Steven
Will the increase be well received, does this compare to the supplement they have been receiving, seems that it falls a bit short, especially when looking at GS 7 up, not really grasping the premium pay while assigned to incidents, are they to receive OT for every hour while on the clock. It’s definitely an improvement, just not sure it will solve retention and recruitment, does the new payscale bring them inline w CalFire. Looks like higher grades are capped. I guess I was expecting more for them, maybe it’s fantastic. Congrats. You all deserve it.
Premium pay is one hour of base salary times 4 per day while assigned to a prescribed fire, severity, or wildfire. It caps at $9,000. So anywhere from 40 days to 100 days on a fire. As a GS Fantastic milita person, it’ll take me 42 days to reach the cap. After that, nothing. No complaints but I am usually 60 days assigned to fires per year. Crazy years have been 100.
It’s better but nothing close to Cal Fire or Municipal Gov pay. It’ll help but doesn’t solve the problems. I was wishing for more for the primary fire folks.
Jeff, the pay increase is substantially more than the retention bonus, over the long term. My calculation, at a gs 7 step 5, is that I will surpass last years gross with 1,000 OT hours with 600 hours of OT at the new pay grade. This doesn’t include H or premium pay. So working 600 OT hours new pay grade equals working 1,000 OT hours with the retention pay. The OT rate, plus premium pay, plus the added pension contribution, will raise the avg firefighter income.