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Seattle Fire Department Stations: How Coverage Actually Works

Published May 1, 2026 · Updated October 13, 2026 · 10 minute read

A Seattle fire engine is not really "your" fire engine. Every station has a home district, but the unit that pulls up to a 911 call is whichever appropriate unit the dispatch system judges can get there first — and on a busy afternoon that is often a crew from a neighboring station, or one already on the road coming back from another call. This guide explains how that works, lists every Seattle Fire Department station and the units it houses, and uses a year of the city's dispatch data to show what those stations actually spend their time on.

The department at a glance

Seattle Fire's 2025 annual report describes the department as five geographic battalions made up of 33 fire stations, plus Battalion 3 and the Medic One program at Harborview Medical Center. The city's public station directory lists 34 numbered locations, from Station 2 in Belltown to Station 41 in Magnolia; one of them, Station 3 at Fishermen's Terminal, houses only fireboats. In 2025 the department had 993 uniformed members — 902 firefighter/EMTs, 56 firefighter/paramedics and 35 chiefs — plus 94 civilian staff. On any given day, 216 members are on duty responding to emergencies, or 220 when two daytime aid units, Aid 4 and Aid 31, are staffed.

Most stations house a single engine company. Eleven also house a ladder truck: Ladder 1 at Station 10, Ladder 3 at Station 6, Ladder 4 at Station 2, Ladder 5 at Station 31, Ladder 6 at Station 8, Ladder 8 at Station 18, Ladder 9 at Station 17, Ladder 10 at Station 25, Ladder 11 at Station 32, Ladder 12 at Station 28 and Ladder 13 at Station 37. Eight paramedic units run from six stations and the Medic One base: Medic 1 and Medic 10 at Harborview, and Medics 17, 18, 26, 28, 31 and 32 at the stations with the same numbers. Battalion chiefs work out of Stations 13, 17, 18, 25 and 32, with the EMS battalion at Harborview.

Every station and what it houses

The table below lists each station's neighborhood, street address and primary response units, as published by the City of Seattle. Reserve apparatus and some support vehicles are left out, and assignments change from time to time, so treat the city's own fire stations page as the authority.

Specialty resources are spread out rather than clustered downtown: the Hazardous Materials Team is at Station 10 in the International District, the decontamination and rehab units at Station 27 in Georgetown, the technical-rescue company (Rescue 1) at Station 14 in SoDo, and the department's fireboats at Station 3 (Fishermen's Terminal), Station 5 (the central waterfront) and Station 36 on Harbor Island (Marine 1). Mass-casualty support units are kept at Station 21 in Greenwood, Station 30 in Mount Baker and Station 39 in Lake City. Station 31 has been operating from an interim site on Interlake Avenue North since crews left the old Northgate Way station in October 2019; the city broke ground on a permanent station at 11302 Meridian Ave. N. in February 2024 and set a target of completing it by the end of 2025.

The closest available unit, not the closest station

When a 911 call comes in, the computer-aided dispatch system recommends units based on what the incident needs — an engine, a ladder, an aid car, a medic unit, or a combination — and on which of those units can get there fastest. Units carry automatic vehicle location, so the system knows where a rig actually is, not just where its station is. A crew finishing a call a few blocks from your address can be the closest available unit even though its station is across the neighborhood.

That is why the unit numbers on the live feed do not always match the nearest firehouse. Your neighborhood station's engine may already be committed to another call; with roughly 307 incidents a day spread across the city, that happens constantly.

Move-ups and big incidents

A working structure fire can commit several engines, ladders, a battalion chief, a medic unit and support apparatus at once, which leaves the surrounding stations empty. To avoid leaving a gap, dispatchers move other units into the vacated stations or into positions that cover the empty area. These "move-ups" are not responses to a 911 call, so they do not appear as incidents in the public data. Coverage is a moving target, redistributed through the day as calls tie units up and free them again.

Mutual aid

Seattle Fire also sends crews outside the city under mutual-aid arrangements with neighboring departments — Shoreline Fire, for example, borders the city to the north — and can receive help when an incident outgrows local resources. It is rare in practice: the 2025 annual report counts 41 mutual-aid responses in 2025, down from 50 in 2024 and 84 in 2023 — a tiny fraction of the department's roughly 109,000 responses that year. Department members also deploy with regional teams; in 2025 Seattle firefighters served with Washington Task Force 1 during flooding in Skagit County.

How fast is the system supposed to be?

Seattle Fire measures itself against standards based on National Fire Protection Association guideline 1710, each meant to be met 90 percent of the time. For medical calls, the department's stated goals are basic life support (CPR and defibrillation) within four minutes and paramedic-level care within eight. The 2025 annual report shows how close the department came:

Of the six measures, only the full first-alarm assignment met the 90 percent mark in 2025, at 95 percent. The first engine arrived within four minutes on 76 percent of fire calls; the first basic-life-support unit reached medical calls within four minutes 67 percent of the time. Those are the department's own figures.

What the stations actually do all day

The live feed draws on the Seattle Fire Real-Time 911 dataset, and a full year of it shows how the workload breaks down. Of 112,001 incidents between October 2025 and September 2026, about 72 percent were medical. Automatic alarms and carbon monoxide detectors were about 10 percent. Fires of every kind, including illegal burns and trash fires, were about 6 percent, and "Fire in Building," the label for an interior structure fire, appeared 250 times.

That medical share is why engines carry EMTs and medical gear and why aid and medic units are spread across the city: the single label "Aid Response" accounted for 55,737 incidents, 49.8% of the year. It is also why the 2025 annual report counts about three-quarters of the department's responses as EMS. For a breakdown of the individual incident types, see our analysis of the ten most common 911 call types in Seattle.

Busiest hours

Demand follows the city's waking hours. The busiest hour of the day was the 1 p.m. hour, with 6,137 incidents over the year, about 17 a day; the quietest was the 4 a.m. hour, with 2,384, about 7 a day — a difference of roughly 2.6 times. The twelve hours from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. carried 61 percent of all incidents. Paramedic responses follow the same curve, peaking in the 12 p.m. hour and bottoming out in the 4 a.m. hour. By day of the week the load is remarkably flat: Wednesday, the busiest day, saw 16,417 incidents, only about 8 percent more than Sunday, the quietest.

The midday peak is exactly when the most units are already committed, so it is when you are most likely to see a crew from a neighboring district arrive at your address.

A seasonal load: brush fires

Some work is seasonal. Brush and bark fires were rare through the winter and spiked in summer: 473 of the year's 715 happened in June, July and August, with Jul the busiest month at 218.

Overall volume was lower this year than last: 112,001 incidents in the twelve months to September 2026, compared with 124,142 in the twelve months before, a drop of about 10 percent. The dataset alone cannot say why; changes in how calls are triaged and classified can move these totals as much as changes in real demand.

Reading the feed with this in mind

When a fire dispatch appears on the live map, the units listed are the ones the dispatch system picked at that moment, not a fixed assignment for the block. A single engine and aid car usually means a medical call; a long list of engines, ladders, a battalion chief and a medic unit means a reported fire or a serious rescue, and it will briefly thin coverage in the surrounding districts. Our guides to Seattle Fire response codes and unit types and how 911 dispatch works go deeper on both.

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