08/31/2026
Months ago, during a meeting about fire service funding, someone made a comment that has stayed with me:
“The problem is, firefighters are starting at the same or more than teachers with master’s degrees.”
What struck me was not only the comparison itself, but what it seemed to reveal about how firefighters and teachers are viewed. The comment appeared to frame firefighters’ compensation as a problem simply because it was comparable to, or higher than, that of teachers with advanced degrees. It also suggested that the value of one profession could be used to diminish the value of another, rather than recognizing that both firefighters and teachers perform essential work and deserve fair compensation.
I see two problems with that statement.
The first is simple: good teachers deserve to be paid more. My mother was a teacher, and I saw firsthand the difference she made in the lives of her students. Nothing I say here is intended to diminish the value of teachers or the many uncompensated hours they dedicate for the good of their students. Nor am I trying to suggest that firefighters are somehow more deserving than anyone else. The two are very different professions, both of which are incredibly important to our communities and in my opinion both are underpaid.
The second problem is something I don’t think is always understood when firefighter salaries are compared to other professions: the number of hours firefighters are scheduled to work.
A firefighter working a traditional three-platoon schedule is scheduled for approximately 2,920 hours per year. By comparison, a typical full-time employee working a 40-hour week works approximately 2,080 hours per year before overtime.
In other words, the firefighter’s schedule includes roughly 840 more hours each year—the equivalent of about 21 additional 40-hour workweeks.
That difference is important because an annual firefighter salary is not necessarily comparable to the annual salary of someone who works a standard 40-hour week. A firefighter’s annual compensation may include pay for substantially more scheduled work hours.
Overtime rules also differ depending on the type of fire department. For public fire departments (I.e., municipal), the Fair Labor Standards Act provides what is commonly called the 7(k) exemption, which allows qualifying departments to use a higher overtime threshold for firefighters. The details are more complicated than I can reasonably explain in a Facebook post.
For a private nonprofit fire department like Calabash Fire, however, our shift firefighters are generally subject to overtime after 40 hours in a seven-day workweek. As a result, the additional hours built into a firefighter’s schedule are not simply part of a standard 40-hour salary. They are generally compensated as overtime under the applicable rules.
So when you look at the annual compensation of one of our shift firefighters, you are not looking at a traditional 40-hour-per-week salary. You are looking at compensation for approximately 2,080 regular hours plus about 840 additional scheduled hours, with those additional hours generally paid at the applicable overtime rate.
It’s easy to look at two annual salary numbers and assume they represent the same thing. They don’t. One may represent a standard 40-hour workweek, while the other reflects a schedule requiring hundreds of additional hours each year, time they are away from their families and personal pursuits.
So before concluding that firefighters are “overpaid” because their annual compensation may equal or exceed that of someone in another profession, we should also consider how many hours each person is required to work to earn that compensation.
Chief Keith McGee
