By William Melhado
The Sacramento Bee
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — For a number of California departments, overtime is an unfortunate necessity. Paying employees time and a half inflates state agencies’ payroll costs, but often the practice is unavoidable to fill critical staffing gaps.
Last year, five California departments each paid more than $100 million in overtime costs, according to the latest payroll data from the State Controller’s Office. For most departments, overtime represents just a fraction of the agency’s total compensation expenses. But for a handful of departments, the nature of their work requires employees to staff facilities 24/7 or respond to emergencies.
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The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation had the highest payroll expenses of any state agency by far last year. CDCR employees were paid $6 billion in 2025, with nearly 10% going to overtime pay.
At the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, the portion of its payroll costs going toward overtime has increased in recent years, which has coincided with the departments’ effort to roll out a new schedule that seeks to improve firefighters’ well-being. Last year, CAL FIRE spent nearly a quarter of its $1.6 billion payroll costs on overtime for employees.
That large share reflects the complex nature of CAL FIRE’s worker schedules, which are different from many other state employees and are frequently disrupted by responding to fires across the state.
Some of the overtime is planned, but a significant amount of it could be eliminated if the department hired more employees to meet CAL FIRE’s staffing needs, said Tim Edwards, president of CAL FIRE Local 2881, which represents over 8,000 firefighters.
The issue of “forced overtime” was so bad, the union sued CAL FIRE over it.
California is already hiring more firefighters
In recent years, state leaders recognized that California firefighters were being stretched too thin. The Legislature allocated hundreds of millions more to increase staffing as part of the transition from a 72-hour to 66-hour workweek for firefighters.
Firefighters’ schedules look different from other state employees’ 40-hour weeks given the 24/7 nature of the department’s needs. Under the previous schedule, firefighters will work on average four 72-hour workweeks during a 28-day cycle. Often those 72-hour workweeks entail three full days on, followed by four days off. The 66-hour schedule follows a similar pattern, but requires six fewer hours of work each workweek.
The reduced schedule — which the union aims to eventually get down to 56 hours — is designed to improve firefighters’ mental health and overall wellness.
The 66‑hour workweek is the department’s “major staffing and funding initiative to improve firefighter health and well‑being by reducing the current 72‑hour workweek to a 66‑hour schedule,” CAL FIRE spokesperson David Acuña said in a statement.
CAL FIRE began rolling out the new schedule in 2024 and over the next five years the department plans to increase the number of frontline firefighters and support personnel to fully adopt the 66-hour workweek. Eventually, CAL FIRE hopes the hiring of more staff will reduce the amount of overtime paid out to employees.
Yet since CAL FIRE began the transition to the 66-hour workweek, the portion of the department’s salary expense going toward overtime has increased. In 2023, 18% of CAL FIRE’s $1.2 billion compensation expenses went toward overtime. The following year, 22% of CAL FIRE’s total compensation expenses went to overtime.
The significant amount of overtime CAL FIRE employees work can be lucrative. In 2024, the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office estimated that “scheduled overtime makes up roughly one‑third of the total base pay for most common firefighter classifications.”
For entry-level seasonal firefighters, the monthly salary range is $3,700 to $4,600. With scheduled overtime, those firefighters can earn an additional $1,800 to $2,300 per month.
The LAO estimated in 2024 that the cost of the transition to the 66-hour workweek would be significant: $770 million when fully implemented, which would reflect a 20% increase to CAL FIRE’s budget between fiscal year 2023‑24 and 2024-25.
Legal challenge over overworked firefighters
Another contributing factor to the amount of overtime firefighters work comes down to how intense a fire season it is, Edwards said.
That type of “unplanned overtime” is part of the job, he added. But frequently firefighters are called on to work “forced overtime,” which happens when there are unplanned staffing gaps as a result of employees taking vacation or sick leave, or employees having to work on fire incidents.
This is also different from “planned overtime,” which requires firefighters to work more than the limits outlined in the Fair Labor Standards Act. They receive overtime pay for those hours as well.
It’s the forced overtime that creates the burden. “They’re constantly forcing people to stay at work just to staff engines, and that’s just because of the lack of staffing in CAL FIRE,” Edwards said.
At one CAL FIRE unit in Riverside, the number of forced overtime days firefighters were required to work nearly doubled between 2017 and 2022, according to the union’s complaint which was filed in 2023.
The lawsuit is still before a Sacramento Superior Court judge, but Edwards said the union is hoping to come to an agreement with the department to limit the amount of time individuals can be forced to be on duty.
The union wants firefighters to be able to go home for a couple of days after working consecutively for 14 days on an incident, Edwards said. He also hopes that through litigation, the union and CAL FIRE can ensure that firefighters won’t be forced to work overtime more than two times during a 28-day pay period.
A CAL FIRE spokesperson declined to comment on the pending litigation.
The complaint was filed before the state began rolling out the 66-hour workweek. Edwards said he hopes that as CAL FIRE increases staffing, the department will need to rely on forced overtime less frequently.
“We’re still in the process of trying to hire up,” he said. “I think once we get there, it might ease up, but we’re not there.”
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