Firefighter Safety Culture

Data reference

Firefighter line-of-duty deaths: what the numbers actually show

By the Fire Fighter Safety Culture editors · September 5, 2026

Every discussion of firefighter safety eventually runs into the same set of numbers: how many firefighters died on duty last year, what killed them, and whether the trend is moving. Those numbers are not as simple as a single headline figure, because two national bodies count them differently and both counts carry caveats. This page lays out what the data actually shows, where each figure comes from, and why the pattern inside the numbers is the reason the safety-culture movement exists at all.

Two counts, not one

There is no single official tally of firefighter deaths. The two most cited come from the National Fire Protection Association and the U.S. Fire Administration, and they use different inclusion rules, so they rarely match. The NFPA has collected on-duty fatality data every year since 1977; the USFA has published its own annual study since 1986. Read either one on its own terms, and never split the difference between them.

According to the NFPA's Fatal Firefighter Injuries in the US report covering 2024, 62 firefighters died on duty or shortly after duty that year, a 31 percent decrease from the 90 on-duty fatalities recorded for 2023, and tied for the fourth fewest since the study began in 1977. The USFA, whose firefighter fatalities study counts a broader set of on-duty deaths, recorded 72 for the same year. The gap is methodological, not a contradiction: the bodies define what counts as an eligible fatality differently. The direction is what both agree on.

The 2024 numbers at a glance

The figures below are from the NFPA's 2024 report as summarized in NFPA's own release and in trade coverage of the report. The NFPA counts fatalities by the year of injury and revises prior years as more information arrives, so a single year's total can move slightly after publication.

Measure2024 (NFPA)
Total on-duty and within-24-hour fatalities62
Occurred while on duty51
Occurred within 24 hours of duty11
Change from 2023 (90 fatalities)Down 31%
Overexertion or strain (leading cause)40 (65%)
Of those, heart attacks30
Deaths at fires or explosions20

The comparison to the USFA's count for the same year is a useful reminder that the number you cite depends entirely on which study you are reading:

Study2024 on-duty countFirst published
NFPA, Fatal Firefighter Injuries in the US621977
USFA, Firefighter Fatalities in the United States721986

What is actually killing firefighters

The single most important thing the data shows is that firefighters are not, for the most part, dying in flashovers or collapses. They are dying of overexertion and strain. According to the NFPA's 2024 report, overexertion or strain was the leading cause of on-duty death, accounting for 40 of the 62 fatalities, or 65 percent. Of those 40, heart attacks accounted for 30 deaths: 20 that occurred while the firefighter was on duty and 10 within 24 hours of duty.

This is not a one-year anomaly. It is the long-run pattern, and it holds across both national studies. According to the U.S. Fire Administration's guidance on cardiovascular disease in the fire service (usfa.fema.gov), "sudden cardiac events, including heart attacks and cardiac arrest, remain the leading cause of firefighter line-of-duty deaths, accounting for nearly 45% of fatalities in recent years." The National Safety Culture Change Initiative report, developed by the International Association of Fire Chiefs with the USFA, puts the long-run share higher, stating that almost half of all firefighter fatalities in the United States are cardiac-related and that the majority of those deaths are found to be related to pre-existing and pre-identified medical conditions.

That last clause is the one that matters for prevention. A death that traces to a condition already on the books is, in principle, a death that medical screening and fitness standards could have flagged. It is why health and wellness sits alongside fireground tactics in the safety-culture literature rather than below it.

Career and volunteer firefighters

The fire service is roughly two-thirds volunteer by headcount, and the fatality data reflects both populations. Of the 51 deaths that occurred while firefighters were on duty in 2024, the NFPA report attributes 26 to career firefighters, 19 to volunteers, and 6 to non-municipal firefighters (a category that includes state and federal wildland personnel). The within-24-hour fatalities, which the NFPA began including in 2022 to align with federal survivor-benefit eligibility, skew more heavily toward volunteers.

The split is worth holding lightly. Because career and volunteer firefighters differ in age profile, call volume, medical screening access, and fitness-program availability, the raw counts describe who died, not a per-firefighter risk rate. The safety-culture point stands regardless: the health-and-wellness gap the NSCCI names, including departments without medical programs and firefighters who have never been medically certified for duty, is more pronounced in the volunteer service.

The trend, honestly

It would be easy to read the 2024 figure as straightforward good news, and in one sense it is: 62 is among the lowest annual totals the NFPA has ever recorded, and the 31 percent drop from 2023 is real. But the honest reading is more cautious on two counts.

First, single-year totals fluctuate. The NFPA notes that on-duty fatalities rose between 2020 and 2023 after reaching a historical low of 48 in 2019, so a good year does not by itself establish a new floor. Second, and more fundamentally, the composition of the deaths has barely moved in decades. Overexertion and cardiac events have led the causes year after year, which means the same preventable mechanism keeps producing the largest share of the losses. The opening finding of the NSCCI report is exactly this: despite decades of better equipment, apparatus safety devices, and wider training, the rate of on-duty firefighter death and injury remained relatively unchanged over four decades. Better gear did not solve a problem that is substantially about fitness, screening, and the decisions crews make before they arrive.

The U.S. Fire Administration frames the purpose of counting all of this plainly. The stated objective of its study is, in its words, to identify and analyze all on-duty firefighter fatalities to increase understanding of their causes and how they can be prevented. The count is not a scoreboard. It is a diagnostic.

What the data implies for safety culture

Read together, the numbers make an argument that the safety-culture literature has made for twenty years. If most firefighters who die on duty die of overexertion and cardiac events, and if most of those cardiac events trace to pre-existing conditions, then the largest available reduction in line-of-duty deaths is not tactical. It is cultural and medical: fitness standards that are actually enforced, medical certification that actually happens, and a department culture that treats a firefighter's cardiovascular health as an operational readiness question rather than a private one.

That is the throughline from the count to the movement built to bring it down. The 16 Firefighter Life Safety Initiatives and the safety-culture idea behind them exist because the fatality data kept saying the same thing: the remaining deaths are not made of gear. They are made of behavior, health, and the shared expectations that govern both.

Sources

The NFPA and USFA use different inclusion criteria, so their annual totals differ by design; each figure above is attributed to the study it comes from. The NFPA counts fatalities by year of injury and revises prior-year totals as additional cases are confirmed, so the 62 figure for 2024 may be adjusted in later reports.