How to become an on-call firefighter

On-call firefighters, also called retained firefighters, are trained firefighters who live or work close to a fire station and respond from wherever they are when their alerter goes off. You agree to be available for a set number of hours each week, stay within reach of the station during those hours, and get there within the response time your service sets. In return you are paid a retaining fee for being available plus hourly payments for incidents and training, linked to wholetime firefighter pay.

How the duty system works

The on-call duty system crews most fire stations in rural areas and smaller towns. Firefighters book themselves available for blocks of time and respond from wherever they are. When a 999 call comes in for the station’s area, the alerter sounds, everyone available drives to the station, and the first crew to assemble goes out on the appliance.

Your service sets two things that decide whether you can do the job:

• an availability commitment, the minimum number of hours a week you agree to be on call, with some services offering different contracts for more or fewer hours
• a response time, the maximum time from the alert to arriving at the station, which in practice means living or working within a few minutes’ drive or run

Services publish their own rules, and some measure the distance from your home or workplace before you apply. Being available means staying sober, staying close by and being ready to drop what you are doing. Evenings at home, nights and weekends are when most people provide cover. Daytime cover is the hardest for stations to find because most people are at work elsewhere.

Pay structure

On-call pay is made up of several parts under the national Grey Book scheme, with some local variation:

• a retaining fee, paid for agreeing to be available, scaled to the hours you commit to
• hourly payments for attending incidents, linked to the wholetime hourly rate for your role
• payments for each turn-out, sometimes called a disturbance fee
• hourly payments for drill nights, courses and other duties

The National Joint Council agreed a 3.8% increase from 1 July 2026 in circular NJC/2/26. For wholetime firefighters that sets pay at £31,539 in development and £40,358 once competent, which is £18.43 an hour. On-call rates are worked out from these wholetime figures, so the same award feeds through to retaining fees and hourly payments, and on-call firefighters move to the competent rate once signed off.

How much you earn depends on how many hours you commit, how busy your station is and how much training you attend. A quiet station with a light commitment brings in a modest extra income, and a busy one with heavy commitment brings in considerably more. Firefighter pay covers the wholetime ranks that the on-call rates are based on.

Tax when it is a second job

Most on-call firefighters have another main job, so the fire service pay is a second source of income. HMRC will usually give your main employer your Personal Allowance and tax the fire service pay at the basic rate, using a BR tax code, unless you tell HMRC to split the allowance. National Insurance is worked out separately for each job. Tax when you have two jobs explains the codes, and the take-home pay calculator can help you check your main salary.

Your main employer

You do not have a general legal right to time off from your main job to respond to fire calls, so daytime cover depends on your employer agreeing to release you. Some do, because they see a benefit in having a trained first aider and someone used to working under pressure. A government toolkit for fire services, still published on GOV.UK, sets out the case services make to employers. Ask your employer before you apply, and get any agreement in writing, including what happens to your pay when you are released.

If daytime release is not possible, you can still offer evening, night and weekend cover, which is often enough for a service to take you on.

Selection and training

Services recruit on-call firefighters by station, often all year round. Selection follows a similar shape to wholetime recruitment: an application, eligibility checks for distance and availability, physical tests based on firefighting tasks, an interview, a medical and references. The firefighter application process goes through each stage.

Initial training is usually spread over weekends and evenings, or in a short block, so that it fits around a main job. After that you join the station, attend a weekly drill night, and build up your development portfolio until you are assessed as competent. Breathing apparatus, driving the appliance and other skills come in stages.

Moving to wholetime

Many wholetime firefighters started on-call, and the experience helps in a wholetime application. Some services also run day-crewed and mixed crewing systems, which combine wholetime shifts with on-call cover from home. How to become a firefighter covers wholetime recruitment.

The NJC pay rates apply across the UK. Scotland and Northern Ireland have single national fire services, and each Welsh region recruits separately, but the on-call system works on the same principles in all of them.