A Shift at Denton Fire: Schedule, Stations, Call Volume

30-second answer. Denton Fire operations moved from 24 hours on, 48 off to 48 hours on, 96 off in January 2026. The department announced the change on January 5, 2026, and its 2025 annual summary lists the transition among the year's goals with the reasons: less mandatory overtime, more recovery time, a wider applicant pool. Three platoons still cover nine stations. A firefighter now works five two-day tours in a typical month instead of ten single days, and is away from the station about twenty days either way. The department counted 24,436 incidents in 2025, most of them medical.

The schedule

The 48/96 pattern is two consecutive 24-hour days on duty followed by four days off, a six-day cycle. Over a year it is the same one-third of the calendar on duty as 24/48, arranged in longer blocks. The department's 2025 summary states the purpose in one sentence: "Transition the Operations division from a 24/48 to a 48/96 shift schedule to reduce mandatory overtime, improve firefighter work-life balance and recovery time, attract more applicants (including dual-certified FF/PMs), distribute workload more evenly across fewer shifts, and maintain or enhance response capabilities with strategic staffing adjustments." The same document commits to a 180-day study with East Texas A&M comparing stress recovery and heart rate variability on the two schedules.

The city's careers FAQ, read September 8, 2026, has not been updated for the change and still describes the earlier three-platoon rotation. The three platoons are unchanged; the rotation is not. Where a city page and a later department publication differ, this guide follows the later one and says so.

The Civil Service Fire Pay Plan, effective January 3, 2026, shows the payroll side: a shift-rate footnote counting 2,928 annual hours worked including FLSA overtime hours, on a 14-day work period with a 106-hour overtime threshold. That is why the plan prints a shift hourly rate and a 40-hour rate side by side for the same annual salary.

Nine stations

The department runs nine stations across the city, from Station 1 on East Hickory Street downtown, which houses administration and the emergency operations center, to Station 9, which opened in 2024. Station 7 sits beside the department's training facility on Vintage Boulevard and covers southwest Denton along I-35W. Station 8 opened in February 2021 to serve the southeast medical corridor. The stations page on this site lists each one with its address and coverage. The 2025 summary adds two rebuilds: Station 6 at Teasley and Hunter Creek, due to open in 2026, and Station 5, with an anticipated opening in spring 2027.

Staffing notes published in the city's facilities directory give a sense of a typical house: Stations 6 and 8 each list five to six firefighters daily, and Station 7 a minimum of five personnel.

The work

The department's 2025 summary puts numbers on the year: 24,436 incidents, of which 14,903 were EMS calls and 12,313 ended in transport; 504 fire calls; 462 hazardous materials calls; 969 rescues. Each station is staffed around the clock by 229 uniformed personnel across two battalions, running nine engines, two aerials, eight medics, four brush trucks and two aircraft rescue firefighting trucks. The ISO Class 1 rating took effect October 1, 2025, and the department earned perfect-score accreditation from the Commission on Accreditation of Ambulance Services in August 2025, one of 34 fire departments in the United States and Canada to hold it. Denton runs advanced life support transport, so a shift is medical calls first by volume, with structural fire, hazardous materials, technical rescue and airport rescue firefighting at Denton Enterprise Airport among the specialties the department lists.

What a candidate should take from this

The 48/96 schedule is the direction a growing number of Texas career departments are taking, and Denton's own reasons for it are on the record. Read the shift as the shape of the job: two days in the house, four out, nine houses, more than 24,000 calls a year. What is specific to Denton is the certification requirement before hire and the department's own physical ability test, both covered in the requirements guide.