Submission Period for the 2026 Station Design Awards Now Open

Now celebrating its 13th anniversary, the prestigious Station Design Awards competition recognizes architects/construction firms and fire departments for their innovations and achievements in fire station design and construction.

Every Station Design Awards entry that is received will appear in Firehouse’s November 2026 issue and online and will be seen by more than 474,000 chiefs, officers, manufacturers and fire service personnel.

“It’s common for fire department personnel who attend the Station Design Conference to bring a copy of the November issue of Firehouse with them, having flagged particular pages of the Station Design Awards section as a means to remind them of station design aspects that caught their attention, so as to ask questions of architects in relation to their own facility projects,” Rich Dzierwa, managing editor, Firehouse, says. “Furthermore, we have been told myriad times that project managers use the Station Design Awards entries to contact fire chiefs for recommendations on architectural firms.”

• View: 2025 Station Design Awards

The 2026 Station Design Awards program is a prime opportunity to be acknowledged as a leader in fire station design and to receive national recognition for your firm and your client.

Projects must have been completed since Jan. 1, 2022.

Judges request that only completed projects be submitted, because renderings are subject to change during approvals, budget adjustments and final construction.

The awards will recognize superlative work in nine categories:

• Career 1: Larger than 15,000 sq. ft., for full-time firefighters.
• Career 2: 15,000 sq. ft. or smaller, for full-time firefighters.
• Co-Located: A single building that houses fire, emergency response, other public safety operations, such as law enforcement, and/or municipal departments but shares amenities, including, but not limited to, a community room, a training room, reception, public toilets and decontamination. The smallest of the operations occupies at least 25 percent of the floor area. (A municipal complex that includes separate buildings for various organizations/operations isn’t considered a co-located facility.)
• Combination: A facility that houses a department that includes paid members and volunteers and/or members who are paid a stipend on a per-event basis or who are paid-on-call.
• Fire Headquarters: Facilities that combine both a fire station and administrative functions within a single building. Site circulation and parking become signfificantly more complicated compared with just an operational station, because public interactions become more numerous. Also complicated is the health & wellness, safety and decontamination features of the operational station because of the combination of crewmember staffing and public components of the headquarters portion.
• Renovations: A facility that was redesigned, repurposed or upgraded in a way that at least 50 percent of the existing building area was affected by the project, although this doesn’t preclude the addition of new building area.
• Satellite: Conceived and built to address the required response times for the jurisdiction. The facility doesn’t include/serve as administration/headquarters, although it can include an office for officers who are assigned to the apparatus that operate out of the facility. It includes a training area. No more than three apparatus bays are on site. No more than one pumper, one truck, one medic unit and/or one special operations rig operate out of the facility. The number of personnel who operate out of the facility doesn’t exceed eight. A satellite station in a volunteer department isn’t staffed.
• Training Facilities: Facilities that are designated for training.
• Volunteer: Facilities that serves volunteer-only fire and emergency response (i.e., a majority of personnel respond from home/aren’t on duty at the station 24/7). Facilities include the basic core elements of a career station (e.g., decontamination, gear storage, safety zones, security and training) and address modern-day NFPA and OSHA mandates.

Entry forms are due July 31, 2026.

If your project is selected for a Station Design Award, the materials that were submitted will be used to create your project’s page(s) in the magazine. Firehouse reserves the right to reject submissions that are deemed unacceptable.

Click here to fill out the entry form.