How Do European Firefighters Actually Want to Work?

How Sweden's biggest change to firefighter working time in more than 40 years led me to look across Europe

By Marcus Aronsson, Firefighter, Sweden

Across Europe, firefighters do much the same job under very different working time systems.

Some work 24-hour shifts. Others work combinations of days and nights, 12-hour shifts, shorter rotating shifts or locally developed systems. The job is recognisable across borders, but the rota often is not.

The UK itself has several different approaches, which makes it particularly interesting when working patterns are compared across Europe.

For me, this question became personal in 2022.

"Four years later, we still hear the same explanation: this was a 'new EU law' and 'the EU required this'."

But did it?

Why this became such a big issue in Sweden

I have worked in the Swedish fire and rescue service for more than 28 years. In my experience, the current dispute is the biggest change to firefighter working time in Sweden since the major reductions in weekly hours more than four decades ago.

In 1976, some Swedish fire services moved from a 56-hour working week to 48 hours. After just over four years, the next step followed. In 1981, the working week was reduced to 42 hours, the level that has since become the basis for full-time shift firefighters covered by the national fire service agreement.

That earlier reform changed the size of the workforce and the way fire services organised their rotas. The changes that began in 2022 have been different, but they have again reached deep into how Swedish fire stations organise everyday life.

The background was criticism from the European Commission concerning Sweden's application of the EU Working Time Directive. The Commission considered that the Swedish arrangements did not guarantee the minimum daily rest required by the Directive. The Swedish labour market parties were told to correct the problem, with a risk that the issue could otherwise be taken further at EU level.

The central parties then renegotiated the collective agreement. New rules on daily rest entered into force in 2023 and, for the fire service provisions, in 2024. The general rule is at least 11 consecutive hours of daily rest in every 24-hour period.

For Swedish firefighters, the practical change was dramatic. Regularly scheduled 24-hour shifts, which had long been part of many Swedish fire service rotas, largely disappeared. Under the current fire service agreement, planned duty can in certain circumstances be extended to 20 hours, followed by corresponding continuous rest. Planned 24-hour shifts require a special dispensation and are intended to be used restrictively.

That is the concrete before and after. A rota that could previously contain regular 24-hour shifts now has to be built around shorter periods of duty unless an exemption is granted. The same number of hours and the same round-the-clock emergency cover still have to be delivered, but they are divided into more attendance periods or different combinations of shifts.

One of the more peculiar features of the Swedish solution is the 20-hour limit. In a service that must operate

continuously, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, planned duty can in certain circumstances be extended to 20 hours, while 24 hours requires special dispensation.

An aerial ladder appliance at Södra Älvsborg Fire & Rescue Service in Borås, Sweden.

The fire station, of course, does not close for the remaining four hours. Someone still has to be there.

From an operational perspective, it is difficult to understand how this was expected to work smoothly in practice. The obvious question is whether the consequences were ever properly tested against the reality faced by local fire and rescue employers and the firefighters who actually staff these services.

A conversation with almost any fire service manager or experienced firefighter would quickly reveal the practical problem: if a service has to be staffed continuously, cutting a 24-hour period into artificial pieces does not remove the staffing requirement. It simply changes how many people, handovers and attendance periods are needed to cover it.

That is why the 20-hour limit has become such a symbol of the wider dispute. The issue is not four hours in isolation. It is whether working time rules have been designed around the reality of a continuous emergency service.

What disappeared was flexibility and local choice

It is also important to understand that the old Swedish system was not simply a choice between working 24 hours every day or never working 24 hours. Some fire and rescue services used split day and night shifts on weekdays and 24-hour shifts at weekends. What made those systems workable was flexibility.

With the employer's approval, firefighters could often exchange shifts with colleagues and combine a day and a night into a 24-hour duty. Sometimes the employer needed it to cover a vacancy or protect a particular competence on a crew. Sometimes the firefighter requested it to make childcare, commuting or family life work. It was a practical tool for both sides.

The new rules did not only restrict 24-hour shifts in the published rota. They also removed much of that flexibility. In many situations, two colleagues could no longer simply agree a swap that resulted in one of them working the full 24 hours, even when both employees and the employer wanted the arrangement. Firefighters have since described a reduced ability to swap shifts and cover colleagues, while fire service managers have pointed out that the rules can make vacancies harder to fill with existing staff.

I think that loss of flexibility matters when we talk about recruitment and retention. Firefighting in Sweden has traditionally been a highly sought-after occupation despite relatively modest pay. The national firefighter training programme, SMO, had 1,306 applicants in spring 2021 and 1,335 in autumn 2021, compared with 698 in spring 2025. Those figures do not prove that working time changes caused the decline. Recruitment is affected by many factors, and staffing problems, especially among retained firefighters, existed long before the daily-rest dispute.

But the direction should make us pay attention. Some full-time services now also report difficulties in recruiting or retaining experienced staff, and firefighters have explicitly linked decisions about staying in the profession to the loss of workable shift patterns. In parts of Sweden, this is beginning to look like a remarkable reversal: a job that for decades attracted far more applicants than available positions, despite modest pay, is increasingly being discussed in terms of recruitment and retention shortages.

By removing one of the profession's strongest non-pay benefits, we may have helped turn a problem we did not have into one we now face: recruitment and retention.

An aerial ladder at Borås Fire Station in winter. Fire and rescue services still have to maintain continuous operational cover, regardless of how working time is organised.

The argument is not simply about 24 hours

The employer side and the central labour market parties have a clear argument. Their position is that the agreement had to be changed because Swedish rules did not guarantee the minimum protection required by the Working Time Directive. Daily rest is a health and safety protection, and tired firefighters are a risk to themselves, their colleagues and the public.

I agree with the importance of recovery. I do not argue that firefighters should simply be allowed to work for as long as they want. My disagreement is about whether the Swedish solution has treated one part of the Directive as if it were the whole Directive.

The Working Time Directive establishes a general entitlement to 11 consecutive hours of daily rest in every 24-hour period. But it also contains provisions that allow derogations for certain activities, including ambulance, fire and civil protection services, provided that equivalent compensatory rest is granted, or in exceptional cases that appropriate protection is provided.

That distinction has been at the centre of my involvement in this issue since 2022. I have argued for greater local flexibility, where employers and employees can agree working arrangements that fit the operational reality of their service, while still protecting health, safety and compensatory rest.

For four years, that argument has often met strong resistance, particularly from the employer side at national level. At the same time, a number of local fire and rescue services have applied for dispensations because they have struggled to make staffing, training, competence and holiday planning work under the new rules.

Published dispensation applications and reports show that these problems are not isolated. Many Swedish fire and rescue services have reported a more strained working situation, increased overtime, difficulties with staffing and recruitment, challenges in maintaining specialist competence, and activities that could not be carried out as planned under the new working time rules.

For firefighters, there is another side that is easy to miss in an agreement document. A rota decides how often you travel to work, how weekends are divided, how long you are away from home and how work fits with children, partners and the rest of life. A change that looks small on paper can be a large change in everyday life.

Fire appliances at Borås Fire Station, Södra Älvsborg Fire & Rescue Service, Sweden

From arguing about Sweden to asking Europe

I do not pretend to come to this subject without a view. I have publicly argued for the possibility of 24-hour shifts when local parties agree, the operational conditions are suitable and equivalent compensatory rest is provided.

That is exactly why I think transparency matters.

After years of debating the Swedish rules, I realised that another opinion was not enough. I wanted evidence, including evidence that might challenge my own assumptions.

How do firefighters in the rest of Europe actually work, and how would they prefer to work?

A 17-language European survey

That question became the starting point for the European Firefighter Working Time Survey 2026.

The survey is now collecting responses across Europe and has been translated into 17 languages. It is being distributed through fire and rescue organisations, training institutions, professional networks, trade unions, firefighter associations and firefighter communities.

The European Firefighter Working Time Survey 2026 is collecting responses across Europe in 17 languages.

It is open to firefighters, officers, managers, employers and people training for a career in the fire and rescue service.

The questions are deliberately broader than 24-hour shifts. We want to know which working time systems are actually being used, which systems people prefer, how working time affects recruitment and retention, whether people choose one employer over another because of the rota, and whether firefighters, managers and future firefighters see the issue in the same way.

We also need to understand context. A busy metropolitan brigade, a rural service, an airport fire service and an industrial brigade may all need different solutions. A rota that works well in one organisation cannot simply be copied into another.

Recovery also has to be part of the comparison. Shift length alone tells us very little unless we also know the workload during the shift, the amount of night work, total weekly working time, how often someone has to attend work and what rest follows afterwards.

What the survey can and cannot tell us

This is a voluntary European survey, not a random sample of every firefighter on the continent. I will not describe it as something it is not.

Responses are being gathered through organisations, direct outreach and professional and social networks. That means participation will vary between countries and groups, and the final report will need to describe those limitations clearly.

But a large, multilingual dataset can still tell us a great deal. It can show which working patterns are being reported in different systems, where preferences differ, where employers and employees agree or disagree, and which questions deserve deeper study.

The goal is not to crown one rota as the best in Europe. It is to replace assumptions with a clearer picture of what actually exists.

Why UK firefighters matter

The UK is an important part of that picture.

British fire and rescue services have their own traditions, shift patterns, staffing models and operational demands. Strong participation from the UK will make it possible to compare British experiences with those reported elsewhere in Europe.

Once data collection is complete, I intend to analyse the results by country, role and type of organisation, while being open about where the numbers are strong and where they are too small to support firm conclusions.

I hope to return to UK Firefighter Hub with those findings.

Four years of debate in Sweden have convinced me of one thing. Before we decide how firefighters should work, we need to understand how they actually work, what they prefer, what employers need and what happens in comparable services elsewhere.

That is what this survey is trying to find out.

Take part in the survey

The English version of the European Firefighter Working Time Survey 2026 is available here:

https://forms.gle/VGYtiSRMNg9HsjXV7

The survey is available in 17 languages and responses are being collected from across Europe.

Marcus Aronsson

Firefighter

Södra Älvsborg Fire & Rescue Service, Sweden

Survey Lead, European Firefighter Working Time Survey 2026