Firefighter / EMT
Also known as: Fireman, EMT, Emergency Medical Technician, First Responder, Wildland Firefighter
Respond to fires, accidents, and medical emergencies to save lives and protect property.
Salary Range
The highest-paid specialization or seniority level for firefighter / emts.
About 1 in 5,000 reaches this level
About 355,300 career firefighters in the US (BLS Employment Projections, SOC 33-2011, 2025); fire chiefs in the largest cities earning ~$400K+ (LAFD chief $473,600) number maybe 50-100 nationwide (~0.02%). Entry covers both halves of the title: EMTs earn $37,960 at the 25th percentile (BLS OEWS, SOC 29-2042, May 2025), and new firefighters start in the $34,910-$44,490 band (10th-25th percentile, BLS OEWS, May 2025).
Salary data based on 2025 BLS, Glassdoor, and industry reports. Actual compensation varies by location, experience, and employer.
How to Become One
Complete fire academy training (12–16 weeks) and earn EMT or paramedic certification. Most departments require passing physical agility tests.
For more information: International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) ↗
A degree isn't required, but these programs can strengthen your career prospects:
Cost to Qualify
All three are salaried training, not tuition: you draw a paycheck as a recruit or trainee from day one, and the department charges no tuition (Philadelphia's own GI Bill table lists 'Tuition and fees charged: $0' for its police academy). What you earn depends enormously on the department: fire-academy pay runs from about $46,900 (Austin) to about $65,000 (Philadelphia), and police-academy pay from about $67,900 (Philadelphia) to $121,654 (San Francisco). Those are published figures from four departments, not a national average - treat them as the shape of the spread. FAA air traffic control trainees earn $22.61/hour during academy training. ATC also has a hard, unusual gate worth knowing before you plan around it: the FAA requires you to be under 31 years of age at application. The flip side is an unusually early exit - the FAA says controllers are eligible to retire at 50 with 20 years of service.
Firefighter recruit academies: Austin pays cadets $22.55/hour ($46,904 a year), rising to $66,019 on graduation; Philadelphia pays fire-academy recruits $64,982 a year. Police academy recruits: Philadelphia pays $67,934 a year in the academy; San Francisco pays its full starting salary of $121,654 from day one of the academy. FAA Academy air traffic control trainees start at $22.61/hour during training with housing and health benefits provided.
Sticker price, not what most people pay — scholarships, aid and in-state status all move it. Room and board is shown separately on each college's page.
AI Risk Assessment
Firefighting is physical, dangerous and unpredictable, and AI cannot do it. Firefighters put out fires, rescue people and answer medical emergencies. AI is showing up around the edges. A battalion chief who chairs the technology council of the International Association of Fire Chiefs wrote in 2025 that departments already use AI to turn incident audio into written transcripts, compare them with procedures for after-action reports, and analyze response data. The same chief wrote that robots still have "a long way to go before they have the dexterity to operate in the conditions we do." A 2025 Microsoft Research study measured how much of each job's tasks AI chatbots can help with, using 200,000 real conversations. Firefighters ranked 626th of 785 jobs, so about four in five jobs scored higher. That is the rubric's "1 Minimal": AI cannot do the core work.
Demand is steady. BLS projects firefighter jobs to grow 4% from 2025 to 2035, about as fast as the average for all jobs, with about 26,800 openings a year, mostly to replace people who retire or leave. BLS notes that better building materials and codes have cut the number of fires over the long run, but firefighters will still be needed for fires, wildland fires and medical emergencies. For the EMT side of this career, BLS projects 6% growth and about 18,200 openings a year, as an aging population has more falls, heart attacks and strokes.
What would change this score. If departments start using AI, drones or robots to cut crew sizes rather than to support crews, this would move to 2. Nothing we have found points that way yet.
Sources
Ratings reflect a 10-year outlook based on 2025-2026 research, weighted toward entry-level impact. Individual outcomes will vary.
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