FEMA publishes a checklist of everything the AFG application asks for. Print it this month. Hand the call volume pages to whoever runs your records, the budget pages to your treasurer, and check your SAM.gov registration yourself. If all three are done before the window opens, the five weeks are for writing, which is what they should be for.
What AFG pays for, and what the last round was
AFG is FEMA's main equipment grant for fire departments. In FEMA's own words it pays for "equipment, protective gear, emergency vehicles, training and other resources" that protect the public and your members.
For the fiscal year 2025 round, FEMA announced $291.6 million for AFG, alongside SAFER for staffing and Fire Prevention and Safety grants. All three opened on May 19, 2026 and closed on June 22, 2026. I do not know the dates of the next round and nobody outside FEMA does either. Watch that page.
The list FEMA already wrote for you
FEMA publishes an AFG application checklist (PDF, 18 pages) alongside the funding notice. Its own opening line says collecting the information beforehand "will reduce the time and energy needed to complete the application". That is the whole idea of this post. Here is what is in it, grouped by who in your department probably holds it.
| What it asks for | Who usually has it |
|---|---|
| Incidents for each of the last three calendar years, broken down by incident type, plus mutual and automatic aid given and received | Whoever does your incident reporting |
| Operating budget for the current year and the two before it, what share goes to personnel, and where every dollar comes from | Your treasurer or board |
| Civilian fire injuries and deaths, and member line-of-duty injuries, over three years | Records, and the chief |
| Every vehicle, front line and reserve, including leased ones and ones on order | Whoever keeps the apparatus log |
| How many members, how many at Firefighter I, and how many at each EMS level | Training officer |
| If you ask for turnout gear, how old every set is, year by year | Whoever issues gear |
| Square miles covered, population, seasonal population, and how much of the area has hydrants | The chief, or the county |
None of that is hard. It is just scattered across four people, and one of them is on vacation the week you need it.
Two rules in the checklist that catch people
Count each incident once. The checklist is specific: a vehicle fire with entrapment and injuries goes in as a vehicle fire, a rescue, or an EMS call, "but not all three". It also asks only for calls where you were the primary responder, so mutual aid you gave is counted separately, not added in.
The budget has to add up, and it has to match. The funding sources have to total 100 percent, and the checklist warns that "it is important that your application remain consistent throughout." If your narrative says taxes are most of your money and the table says fund drives, a reviewer notices.
The one you cannot fix in June
Your department needs an active registration on SAM.gov, the federal system every grant applicant uses. The checklist asks whether your registration is current and what its expiration date is, and it tells you to search SAM.gov to confirm your Unique Entity Identifier matches. You also need an account in FEMA GO, the system you actually apply through.
A SAM.gov registration has an expiration date, and nothing at the station reminds you when it passes. Checking it takes a search. Fixing it in the middle of a five week window is a much worse afternoon. Look it up this week.
The reporting change you may have missed
The checklist says outright that if you receive an award you will be required to report incidents to the national system. That system has changed. NFIRS stopped accepting incident reports dated after December 31, 2025, and FEMA says it was to be fully offline by February 2026. Its replacement is NERIS, the National Emergency Response Information System.
If your department has not moved over yet, that is worth sorting out before an award, not after it.
Start the narratives early, and keep them short
The application has several written sections: financial need, a description of your community, and for each thing you ask for, a project description, a cost benefit narrative and a statement of effect. Each one is capped at 4,000 characters including spaces. That is roughly a page.
A page is short. The work is deciding what to leave out. Draft the community description this winter while nobody is waiting on it, because it barely changes from year to year.
If your need is small, the checklist also lists a Micro Grant option, capped at $50,000 in federal money. And if you want a vehicle as well as equipment, a vehicle is a separate application. Read the funding notice for the limits on how many you can submit.
Do this before the end of the year
- Download FEMA's checklist and print it.
- Look up your SAM.gov registration and write the expiration date on the front page.
- Confirm somebody can log in to FEMA GO.
- Ask for three calendar years of incident counts, by type, counted once each.
- Ask your treasurer for three years of budget with every funding source as a percentage.
- Check you are reporting to NERIS.
Why I am writing this
I build websites for fire departments, so you can fairly expect a pitch. Here it is, and it is a small one: nothing on this page needs a website. A grant that buys SCBA matters more than anything I make.
I have also written up why volunteers are not applying to your department and whether the ADA website deadline applies to you. If the answer to that second one is yes, that is when I am useful.