Emergency Medical Service workers in New York City make as little as $18 an hour. They are a division of the Fire Department, where firefighters can make twice as much.
By James Barron | July 17, 2026
An emergency medical technician in New York City has a high-pressure, high-drama job, and it doesn’t pay much. Now, as the city negotiates a new contract for Emergency Medical Service workers, I talked with Eliza Shapiro, a Metro reporter who covers the affordability crisis and wrote about how E.M.T.s get by — and whether Mayor Zohran Mamdani can get them a raise.
What stopped everyone who read your article was that some paramedics are paid as little as $18 an hour. That’s $2 above the minimum wage in New York City.
Yes. I have been writing about New York City government since I was a teenager, and even so, I was shocked by how little so many E.M.S. workers are paid.
E.M.T.s and paramedics work for the Fire Department. Why the disparities between what firefighters are paid and what paramedics are paid?
It’s one of those quirks of how city government works — E.M.S. merged with the Fire Department in the 1990s, but some people describe it as a marriage that never really took. Firefighters can make about double what many E.M.S. workers top out at.
The disparities in pay have never been resolved. It’s an issue that every mayor knows is a problem but never seems to get around to tackling.
There’s turnover at E.M.S. How many E.M.S. workers leave in a year? Where do they go?
The city and the unions representing E.M.S. workers are in agreement that turnover is a problem for the E.M.S. force.
It’s gotten particularly acute in the last few years. The union expects 900 people to leave the force this year.
E.M.S. workers can “promote up” to become firefighters with better pay and benefits. Some leave the city payroll for private ambulance services or join public ambulance services on Long Island or upstate, where the pay tends to be better.
So E.M.T.s who like their intense, demanding jobs can’t live on what the city pays them.
That’s right. Take Taysha Soto, an E.M.T. I spoke with at length. She is a 29-year-old single mother of two who grew up in New York and wanted to become an E.M.T. after she watched her mother die of lung cancer and felt helpless to do anything.
But she says she has little choice but to seek another job with higher pay. She made about $56,000 last year — but only took home $1,500 or so every two weeks, and that was only because she worked so much overtime. “Tons and tons” of overtime was how she put it.
The trouble is that the more she works, the more she has to pay her babysitter, who sometimes works from 6:30 in the morning until 11 at night.