Staffing debates usually happen in the abstract. This one does not have to. The Maui Fire Department publishes an operational roster, station by station and shift by shift, and it marks every open position with a single word: VACANT. The version effective May 1, 2026 names ten of them on the firefighting line. Read alongside the county's adopted budget, the roster tells a clear story, and it is not the story a low vacancy number alone would suggest.
What the Roster Says
The Department of Fire and Public Safety's Employee Roster and Phone List, effective May 1, 2026, lists each engine, ladder, hazmat, and rescue company across three watches. Ten line positions are marked VACANT, each tied to an established, funded position number. These are not recruit slots waiting to be created. They are real seats on real apparatus that no one is currently in.
Engine 2, Paia · Ladder 3, Lahaina · Engine 4, Kaunakakai (Molokai) · Engine 5, Makawao · Engine 10, Kahului (two positions) · Hazmat 10, Kahului · Engine 11, Napili · Engine 14, Wailea (two positions). A separate opening for a Health and Safety Bureau specialist is listed apart from the line count.
Maui Fire Department, Employee Roster and Phone List, effective May 1, 2026
Two of these are worth naming plainly. The Ladder 3 company in Lahaina, the district that lost 102 lives in the August 2023 wildfire, carries an unfilled firefighter position. And Engine 14 in Wailea, one of South Maui's fastest-growing and highest-traffic areas, carries two, across two different shifts. These are not projections or union estimates. They are printed on the county's own document.
The Honest Math, and Why the Small Number Is Not Reassuring
Here is the part that has to be said straight, because getting it wrong would be easy. The county's FY2026 adopted budget funds 325 positions in the Fire/Rescue Operations program. Ten vacancies against 325 funded positions is a vacancy rate of roughly three percent. On its own, that is a low number, and department leadership has described it that way to the Fire Commission more than once.
So this is not a story about a fire department that is hollowed out today. It is a story about the trend line and the pipeline behind it, and that is where the roster and the budget together become alarming.
funds, up from 288 three years ago
county's own May 2026 roster
when enough vacancies exist to fill one
The number of funded firefighting positions has grown steadily: 288 in FY2023, then 298, then 319, and 325 in FY2026. The county keeps adding seats. The question is whether it can fill them, and the evidence says filling them is getting harder, not easier. Firefighter applications on Maui have fallen by more than 70 percent since 2017, and, according to the Maui Division, the department has said that with only a handful of vacancies at a time it does not make sense to run a recruit academy, because a class costs too much to stand up for a few openings. So the county is carrying a growing number of funded seats, a shrinking applicant pool to fill them from, and stretches with no new class in training. The Maui Division says a recruit class is coming, and that its spots are again being filled by reaching down to candidates who scored in the 50s.
There is also a category the three-percent figure misses entirely. At an April 2026 commission meeting, the department explained that it had "unfunded some positions" it is "still holding," setting them aside until facilities like new stations are ready. Those held positions are real gaps in the department's designed strength, but they are not counted as vacancies because they are not currently funded. The true distance between the department the county designed and the one that shows up to emergencies is wider than the vacancy line alone.
Why Ten Open Seats Matter More Than Ten Sounds Like
A fire company is not a headcount. It is a team that has to perform several life-safety tasks at once: advancing a hose line, searching for victims, forcing entry, and ventilating, all in the first minutes. National research on crew size is consistent that five-person crews complete those tasks faster and more safely than smaller ones, and that when crews thin out, the people who wait longer are the residents inside. (The staffing research is laid out on our staffing-data page.)
Every vacant seat on a roster is absorbed somewhere: by overtime, by running a company short, or by a position held open. A three-percent vacancy rate in a growing department that cannot reliably refill itself does not stay at three percent by accident. It stays there because the people already on the job keep covering the gap, on a schedule that already runs well past a standard work week. What the roster shows today is manageable. What the pipeline behind it shows is a system running without much margin, in a place where help is never a county away.
Maui's fire department publishes a roster that marks open positions as VACANT. The May 2026 version names ten on the firefighting line, including one on the Lahaina ladder truck and two in Wailea. Ten out of 325 funded positions is a low vacancy rate right now, and that is true. The worry is the direction: the county keeps funding more firefighter positions, the pool of people applying has dropped by more than 70 percent, the department has, according to the Maui Division, skipped running a recruit class, and it is also holding some positions unfunded on the side. The gap is small today and getting harder to close tomorrow.
Sources & References
- Maui Fire Department, Employee Roster and Phone List, effective May 1, 2026 (ten named line vacancies; Ladder 3 Lahaina; Engine 14 Wailea; Health and Safety Bureau specialist)
- County of Maui, FY2026 Program Budget, Department of Fire and Public Safety (Fire/Rescue Operations authorized positions: 288 in FY2023 rising to 325 in FY2026)
- Maui County Fire & Public Safety Commission, meeting minutes, January 15 and March 19, 2026 (department's characterization of vacancies as low)
- Maui County Fire & Public Safety Commission, meeting minutes, April 16, 2026 (department on "unfunded" positions being held)
- Recruit classes: that the department says a class costs too much to run for a few openings, that it has skipped a class, that another is now coming, and that its spots are again being filled from candidates who scored in the 50s is the Maui Division's account. It is not in the published Commission minutes. The county's employment page says it "hires new fire fighters only when there are enough vacancies to fill a recruit class" and that the recruit class runs eighteen weeks (mauicounty.gov/1468/Employment, read September 18, 2026)
- Firefighter applicant-pool decline: see Fewer People Are Applying to Be Firefighters on Maui
- Crew-size research (NIST, Dallas Fire Department, USFA/NFIRS): see our staffing-data page