How NERIS Compliance Is Measured
NERIS compliance is measured at the field level, not the record level. An incident can be submitted and technically accepted even if mandatory fields are blank — which means departments often believe they are compliant when their data has significant gaps.
Compliance audits examine what percentage of incidents have each mandatory field populated. A field is considered compliant when it is present, non-null, and logically valid (e.g., arrival time is after alarm time).
Module 1: Core Incident
This is the foundational module. Every incident requires all of these fields:
- Incident ID (neris_id_incident): The unique identifier assigned by your RMS. Nearly always present if your system is configured correctly.
- Entity ID (neris_id_entity): Your department's NERIS-assigned identifier. Must be consistent across all records.
- Incident Type: The NERIS incident category. This drives whether other modules (like the Fire Module) become required.
- Incident Status: Whether the incident is open, closed, or cancelled. Often missing when records are created but not closed out in the RMS.
- Alarm Time (call_create): When the call was received. Critical for response time calculations.
- Dispatch Time: When the unit was dispatched. This is the most commonly missing core field. Many CAD-to-RMS integrations drop this timestamp.
- Arrival Time: When the first unit arrived on scene.
- Cleared Time: When the last unit cleared the scene. Often missing for long incidents or when crews forget to notify dispatch.
Module 2: Location / Geocoding
- Latitude & Longitude: GPS coordinates for the incident location. Required for NERIS — not just for geographic analysis, but for federal reporting aggregation.
- Address: Street address of the incident. Many RMS systems capture this but don't always geocode it to coordinates automatically.
If your RMS doesn't auto-geocode, you may need to enable a geocoding integration or manually verify address data. Incidents without coordinates cannot be used in community risk analysis or ISO coverage mapping.
Module 3: Life Safety Outcomes
All incidents must include:
- Civilian Injuries (count, even if zero)
- Civilian Fatalities (count, even if zero)
- Firefighter Injuries (count, even if zero)
- Firefighter Fatalities (count, even if zero)
The critical distinction: a zero value is valid. A blank value is non-compliant. Your RMS must require these fields and default them to zero, not leave them null when nothing happened.
Module 4: Actions & Tactics
- Primary Action Taken: What the responding unit's primary action was (e.g., "Rescue, remove from harm," "Fire control," "Investigate"). Required for all incidents.
Module 5: Fire Module (Conditional)
Required for any incident classified as a fire. If your incident type is any variant of structure fire, vehicle fire, brush/grass fire, explosion, or EV battery fire, these fields become mandatory:
- Area of Origin: Where the fire started within the structure or property
- Fire Cause: The determined cause (accidental, intentional, undetermined)
- Construction Type: The building construction class (Type I through Type V)
These fields are critical for state and federal fire analysis — and for documenting the complexity of incidents in grant applications.
Module 6: Aid Classification
- Aid Type: Whether your department gave aid, received aid, or neither. Mutual aid tracking is increasingly important for regional planning and grant justification.
How to Identify Your Gaps
The fastest way to identify compliance gaps is to run a field-level completion analysis across your recent incident data. Export your last 12 months of incidents and check what percentage of records have each mandatory field populated.
Common findings:
- Dispatch time: 40–70% missing at departments without direct CAD integration
- Cleared time: 15–30% missing across all departments
- Life safety fields: Often null (rather than zero) because crews don't complete them on routine calls
- Fire module fields: Missing on 20–40% of fire incidents when the RMS doesn't force completion