Volunteer Fire Grants

Readiness

Getting your department grant-ready (and the NERIS switch)

The registrations, reporting, and legal basics every fire grant assumes you already have. Get these done in the off-season and you can apply the day a window opens. General information — not legal advice.

NFIRS is retired — NERIS is the system now
NFIRS went offline in February 2026. NERIS (free) is the sole incident-reporting path AND a condition of AFG awards. Onboarding now is the single cheapest thing a department can do to be grant-ready.
Verified against USFA — NFIRS Sunset on
The federal registration stack
You need an EIN, a UEI + active SAM.gov registration (renew every year), a login.gov account, and a FEMA GO account. A lapsed SAM registration is the #1 last-minute killer — it blocks the application entirely.
Verified against FY25 AFG NOFO (Steps to Apply) on

Most departments that miss out on grants don’t lose on the merits — they lose because a registration lapsed or the reporting wasn’t in place. All of this is off-season work you do once so you can apply the moment a window opens.

Onboard to NERIS now

For years the advice was “get into NFIRS.” That advice is now wrong. NFIRS went offline in February 2026, and NERIS (the National Emergency Response Information System — free, cloud-based) is the sole reporting path. It’s also a condition of AFG awards: funded departments must report during the grant. Beyond compliance, your incident data feeds the call-volume and need narrative every application requires. Onboarding is free at fsri.org — do it now.

The registration stack

In order, and none of it costs money:

  1. EIN from the IRS (free, online).
  2. UEI (Unique Entity Identifier) via SAM.gov (this replaced DUNS).
  3. login.gov account — use the same email as SAM so they link.
  4. SAM.gov registration — free, but must be renewed every year and stay active for the whole grant. A lapsed SAM is the most common reason a ready application can’t be submitted.
  5. FEMA GO account for AFG/SAFER/FP&S.

Start weeks ahead — SAM renewal is slow.

Your legal structure (general information — not legal advice)

Confirm your department’s status with counsel and your state association. In general, fire departments fall into two models, and both are eligible for the federal programs on this site:

  • a governmental entity (municipal, county, or an independent fire district/authority), or
  • an independent nonprofit — commonly a 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(4) volunteer fire company.

For AFG/SAFER/FP&S and USDA Community Facilities, governments and 501(c)(3)s both qualify (for-profit departments don’t). Whatever your structure, the applying entity needs its own EIN, and its legal name must match SAM.gov exactly.

On donations (again, general framing — confirm with a tax professional and see IRS Pub 526): gifts to a 501(c)(3) are generally deductible; to a 501(c)(4), generally not; to a governmental unit for public purposes, generally deductible. That’s why many volunteer companies keep a 501(c)(3) or a (c)(3) auxiliary for fundraising.

Next step

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