Congress Gave Wildland Firefighters a Permanent Raise. They Say the Job Is Still Failing Them.

Two things are both true about federal wildland firefighting going into the 2026 fire season.▸ The government spent more on it, and fixed a decade-old pay complaint, in the same twelve months. And the people doing the job say, in their own words, that it isn't working. Money moved. The crisis didn't.

Wildland fire management isn't one line item — it's split across preparedness, active suppression, hazardous-fuels reduction, and a reserve fund that only opens once the baseline runs dry.▸ In fiscal 2025, the Forest Service and Interior Department received a combined $7.3 billion for wildfire purposes, per the Congressional Research Service — $5.5 billion to the Forest Service, $1.8 billion to Interior.

The single biggest slice, $2.75 billion combined, doesn't fund a firefighter or an engine at all — it's the Wildfire Suppression Operations Reserve Fund, a standby account both agencies draw from once their baseline suppression budgets are exhausted, which in a bad fire year they routinely are.▸ Only after that comes the money that actually staffs the line: $1.4 billion in FS salaries and expenses, and a combined $1.4 billion in suppression operations. The budget, in other words, is built to survive a bad season financially. It says nothing about whether the people fighting the fire can survive it professionally.

Roughly 18,700 people hold these jobs across the Forest Service and four Interior Department agencies, per the Government Accountability Office.▸ For most of the last decade, entry-level ones were paid as little as $15 an hour — the single most-cited reason GAO found federal agencies couldn't recruit or keep them. A temporary pay supplement, first authorized in 2021, kept getting extended one budget cycle at a time — until March 2025, when the Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act made it permanent: a new special base-rate pay table that raises base pay by 42% at the lowest grade down to 1.5% at GS-15, retroactive to March 23, 2025. Unlike the old supplement, the new base pay counts toward retirement.

By that measure, the raise worked: headcount climbed every year since 2023, and by July 6, 2026 the Forest Service had 11,816 wildland firefighters onboard nationwide — 104% of its 11,300-person hiring goal, reached earlier than any year since 2022.▸ But the agency's own workforce page immediately undercuts the achievement: "this isn't enough capacity to meet the needs of the continuing wildfire crisis... this is the number of firefighters we are able to support with existing infrastructure, funding and other resources." The target was hit. The target, by the agency's own account, was never big enough.

In March 2026, Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, in partnership with the National Federation of Federal Employees, surveyed 825 active fire personnel across the Forest Service, BLM, NPS, FWS, and BIA — the five agencies that make up the federal wildland fire workforce.▸ The results, published that May: 62.2% of units report operating below full authorized strength, and a quarter are below 75% of strength. 82% of respondents worked more than 500 hours of overtime in the past year; nearly one in four topped 1,000 hours — the equivalent of 25 extra full work weeks. And 74.4%, three out of four, said they'd considered leaving federal wildland fire in the past 12 months, with 15.3% actively job-hunting.

Pay is on that list — 56.7% cite it — but it isn't first.▸ Work-life balance and overtime outrank pay itself, at 67.2%. That's the tell: the 2025 reform raised the rate per hour, but it didn't touch the number of hours, or the number of people available to share them. With 62% of units short-staffed, the same fixed amount of fire still has to get fought, which means the raise arrived priced into a job that had gotten no less exhausting. Only 11% of respondents said they'd recommend the career without reservation.

Money figures cover FY2025 enacted appropriations as reported by CRS; category subtotals are independently rounded in the source and won't sum to the cent. Workforce survey figures come from a voluntary, self-selected sample of 825 respondents (825 of 860 submissions passed quality filters) fielded by an advocacy organization in partnership with a federal employee union, not a government statistical survey — treated here as the workforce's own account of conditions, not as a census.