The 911 shortage is easing. The cost of losing trainees isn't.

Every 911 center in the country runs the same machine: recruit a telecommunicator, train them for the better part of a year and a half, and hope they're still answering calls when it's over.▸ A City of Portland performance audit published June 24, 2026 shows what that machine costs when it breaks down — and what it looks like when a system claws its way back from crisis without fixing the underlying arithmetic. Nationally, the 2025 Pulse of 9-1-1 report from NENA and Carbyne — 1,379 emergency-communication professionals surveyed — tells the same story at scale: the worst of the hiring crisis has passed, but the seats aren't full and the reason people leave has changed.

Portland's Bureau of Emergency Communications entered the pandemic era in free fall: 33 vacancies out of a much smaller authorized roster in July 2022, an average 911 call wait of 77 seconds, and only 29% of calls answered within the national 15-second standard.▸ Staffing then fell further before it recovered — bottoming out at 40 vacancies in February 2023 — before over-hiring, more frequent training academies, and temporary overtime and coaching-pay premiums brought it back.

By January 2026 the bureau was down to six vacancies against 91 fully certified Senior Dispatchers, and the average call wait had fallen to 18 seconds.▸ That is a real recovery, documented month by month in the bureau's own Director's Reports and verified by the city auditor. It is also, as of April 2026, still short of the national standard — 90% of 911 calls answered within 15 seconds — that Portland has not yet met.

The vacancy count only tells you how many chairs are empty today.▸ It doesn't say what it cost to get there, and Portland's answer is blunt: a lot of the money spent recruiting, hiring, and training new dispatchers never produces a working dispatcher at all. Between July 2022 and December 2025, around 46% of the bureau's trainees were terminated or resigned before they finished training, consistent with a national estimate — cited in the audit from public-safety consultant Mission Critical Partners — that 50-60% of dispatcher trainees complete training nationwide.

Training is not cheap to begin with.▸ A 2024 analysis by Portland's Public Safety Service Area, cited in the audit, put the cost of an 18-month dispatcher trainee at roughly $137,000 in wages and benefits alone — before hiring costs, overtime, and coaching-pay premiums — and about $7,500 for every month training runs past 18. Over roughly 3.5 years, the city paid $3.4 million in salaries, benefits, and related costs for trainees who never finished — a number the audit notes would be higher still if the bureau's other recruitment and hiring costs were included.

Portland is one city's ledger.▸ The Pulse of 9-1-1 report puts a number on the national picture, and it moves in the same direction: fewer centers report unfilled seats than a year ago, and fewer say they're struggling to hire — but "fewer" is not "few."

Three-quarters of centers still carry open positions.▸ And the survey's authors flag a shift underneath the improving numbers: in 2024, the top- ranked staffing challenge nationally was simply not being able to hire enough people. In 2025, for the first time, staff burnout outranked hiring as the number one reported challenge — the strain moved from the front door to the people already inside.

Portland figures come from one city's audited Director's Reports and Public Safety Service Area cost analyses and are not necessarily representative of every 911 center nationally; the national figures are self-reported survey responses from 1,379 emergency-communication professionals, not a census of every U.S. public-safety answering point.