The City Council is pushing for a pay raise for emergency medical technicians in a bid to rescue an underpaid workforce that bleeds employees year after year.
The Council included $50 million in additional baseline funding to boost the pay of roughly 3,900 city-employed EMTs and paramedics in its rebuttal to Mayor Eric Adams’ $114.5 million preliminary budget proposal on Wednesday. The funding would bring the salaries closer to firefighters and their counterparts in other jurisdictions to help stem attrition rates that have averaged 8.3% in recent years, according to the Council’s budget document.
Its inclusion in the Council’s proposal, which has $2.2 billion more in fiscal year 2026 than Adams’, aligns the body with the city’s EMT union and echoes an urgent message from the mayor’s new fire commissioner, Robert Tucker, who said the service could “collapse” without a greater investment from the city earlier this year.
The department has been under strain for years, with higher numbers of emergency calls and fewer ambulances on the road, which has contributed to ballooning emergency response times. The inclusion of the funding in the Council’s budget response sets up the body for a fight with the Adams administration, which reported $6.3 billion less in city revenue than the Council, as budget negotiations unfold over the next few months.
Starting salaries for EMTs range from $39,000 to $47,000 compared with $54,000 for firefighters, according to FDNY EMS Local 2507, which represents the city’s municipal EMS workforce. Their raises are smaller too. EMTs make between $59,000 and $76,000 after five years compared to the $105,000 firefighters earn, the union said.
The proposed baselined funding would increase the base salary by close to 4% annually, and 24% by the fifth year, according to the Council’s budget document. The move is estimated to bring EMTs and paramedics’ salaries to approximately 90% of firefighters’ pay, subject to collective bargaining, said Mara Davis, a spokeswoman for Council Speaker Adrienne Adams.
The city has been in contract negotiations with the union since the EMS workers’ contracts expired in 2022. The union’s president, Oren Barzilay, said the Council’s pay boost would rectify the parity issue but is not celebrating until the provision makes it into the final budget.
“You have app drivers making more than us. You have babysitters, teenagers, making more than us,” he said, noting that fewer resources is hampering the city’s ability to respond to emergencies everyday. “So the public is paying the price for this now.”
