Mandatory overtime. Commute. Physical training on your own time. Gear maintenance. It all counts, and almost nobody adds it up.
Run your numbers below. That one number changes everything about how you think about overtime.
The Calculator
Enter your gross annual pay to run the numbers.
This is an estimate for your own awareness, not tax or financial advice. It uses a 56-hour work week baseline of 2,912 standard hours per year before overtime, which fits most firefighter schedules. If you work a different schedule (many cops and single-function medics do), your base hours differ, so treat the result as a starting point and adjust.
What this means
If your number is under $25 an hour, your overtime is subsidizing a budget that doesn't work on base pay alone. That's not a hustle. That's a structural problem.
If your number surprised you, you're not alone. Most first responders have never done this math. Most departments don't want you to.
The overtime trap works like this. You pick up extra shifts to cover payments on a truck, a boat, a trailer... things losing value every month. The overtime feels like winning. It's actually the budget telling you something is broken underneath.
This calculator is just the first piece. A deeper first responder finance breakdown is in the works and rolls out as the community grows. The weekly briefing is where it lands first.
This is the kind of math the weekly briefing runs every Tuesday at 7AM.
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