The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service has issued its 2025‑26 statistical bulletins, added fresh workbooks and fixed a local‑authority data error for analysts.
The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS) continues its commitment to transparency by issuing two core statistical bulletins each year. These publications provide a snapshot of fire-related activity, organisational capacity and incident trends across Scotland. Alongside the bulletins, the service supplies downloadable workbooks, visual infographics and policy guidance to help stakeholders interpret the data correctly.
All statistics are subject to periodic revision, and SFRS urges users to reference the most recent version of the Tables and Charts workbook before drawing conclusions. The agency also maintains a public archive where earlier editions can be accessed for comparative research.
Publication schedule and data products
Two distinct bulletins dominate the annual release cycle: the Fire Safety and Organisational Statistics bulletin, due on 31 August 2027, and the Incident Statistics bulletin, slated for 30 October 2026. Each issue is accompanied by a downloadable Excel workbook that aggregates tables, charts and raw datasets.
Users also receive a concise infographic that highlights the most salient trends, plus a dedicated policy document that is refreshed as regulatory frameworks evolve.
To enhance usability, SFRS provides a guidance note that explains the methodology behind each dataset, clarifies definitions, and offers suggestions for visualising the information. This package is designed to serve a broad audience, ranging from local authorities and fire-service managers to academic researchers and community safety advocates.
Contents of the 2025-26 bulletins
The most recent Fire Safety and Organisational Statistics 2025-26 covers a wide array of topics: workforce composition, the number and distribution of fire stations, inventories of fire-fighting vehicles and appliances, incidents involving personnel, home-visit safety checks, and non-domestic fire-prevention activities. Complementary files include a detailed fire-stations dataset, a comprehensive vehicles dataset and a set of explanatory guidance notes.
In parallel, the Incident Statistics 2025-26 bulletin delivers quantitative insight into call-outs, response times, and the nature of emergencies handled throughout the reporting year. Both bulletins feature a “highlights” infographic that distils key findings into easily digestible visuals, and a pre-release list that outlines forthcoming data releases.
Local-authority drill-down data correction
A post-publication audit uncovered inaccuracies within the local-authority drill-down table (Table FL_LA1). Specifically, several authority figures were omitted, while data from the preceding year were inadvertently duplicated, leading to mismatched totals for certain areas. The error was confined to a single sheet in the Tables and Charts workbook and did not alter the headline messages of the main report.
Users who have extracted figures from the original Table FL_LA1 should discard those numbers and download the corrected version now available on the SFRS portal. National aggregates remain unchanged, ensuring that overarching trends are still reliable.
Preventing future discrepancies
To avoid repeat occurrences, SFRS will now align local authorities using official geography codes rather than name strings. Automated validation routines have also been introduced to verify that all 32 Scottish authorities are present and that their summed values match the national total before any workbook is published.
For further clarification or assistance regarding the revision, interested parties may contact the statistics team at [email protected].
