Sponsors (16)
Official title: To amend title 5, United States Code, to provide for special base rates of pay for wildland firefighters, and for other purposes.
Introduced March 6, 2025 by Joseph Neguse · Last progress March 6, 2025
The bill raises pay, hazard premiums, and safety/leave protections for federal wildland firefighters—improving compensation and reducing fatigue—but does so with caps, agency discretion, and fund shifts that limit and complicate the benefits while increasing taxpayer and budgetary costs.
Federal wildland firefighters (Forest Service and DOI) receive multi-grade base pay increases and continuity of those raises, boosting take-home pay and increasing retirement/benefit calculations for affected employees.
Employees deployed to qualifying wildland incidents gain a large daily premium pay entitlement (expanded to cover prevailing-rate/wage employees) and clearer eligibility rules, immediately increasing compensation for hazardous deployments and extending pay to more frontline workers.
Covered wildland firefighters receive immediate paid rest-and-recapture (R&R) leave after qualifying deployments, plus optional deployment-length limits and a 16-hour average work cap option to reduce fatigue and improve health and safety.
The package raises federal personnel costs (higher base pay, premium pay, and paid R&R) and redirects up to $5 million of IIJA unobligated funds, increasing budgetary pressure and shifting taxpayer-funded resources away from other priorities.
Caps and calculation limits (annual $9,000 premium cap; premium pegged to GS-10 step 10 locality rates; Executive Schedule IV cap for prevailing-rate increases) reduce the real value of increases for higher-paid or long-deployed firefighters and limit pay parity.
Key premium pay is treated as non-basic pay (excluded from leave lump-sum, FLSA minimum-wage/overtime calculations, and some benefit computations), so the pay boost may not improve downstream benefits or legal pay protections.
Based on analysis of 5 sections of legislative text.
Creates higher special base pay, incident response premium pay, and paid R&R leave for federal wildland firefighters; permits up to $5M IIJA transfer to continue prior pay increases.
Creates permanent higher pay and new benefits for federal wildland firefighters at the Forest Service and Department of the Interior. It replaces standard GS base pay with grade-specific "special base rates," establishes a daily incident-response premium pay, creates paid rest & recuperation (R&R) leave for deployed certified wildland firefighters, and allows up to $5 million in transfers from specified IIJA balances to continue prior temporary wildland firefighter pay increases without interruption. The law applies to Forest Service and DOI employees who are certified wildland firefighters or agency-certified to perform incident-related duties while deployed, sets rules for when premium pay and R&R apply, requires the Secretaries to issue uniform policies, and phases in the new base-rate treatment to follow the end of prior temporary IIJA pay authorities.