The Wildland Firefighter Paycheck Protection Act of 2025 aims to enhance compensation and working conditions for federal wildland firefighters. It amends Title 5 of the U.S. Code to establish special base rates of pay for wildland firefighters employed by the Forest Service or Department of the Interior. These new rates replace the standard General Schedule base rates and are considered basic pay for all purposes, including locality pay calculations. The special base rates are computed by increasing the applicable General Schedule base rate by percentages ranging from 42% for GS-1 to 1.5% for GS-15, with similar increases for prevailing rate employees.

The bill also introduces a new incident response premium pay for covered employees deployed to qualifying incidents, such as wildfires, prescribed fires, or severity incidents. This premium pay is set at a daily rate of 450% of the employee's hourly basic pay. However, it is capped at the daily rate for a GS-10, step 10, and has an annual limit of $9,000 per calendar year. The Secretaries of Agriculture and the Interior are directed to assess and potentially adjust this premium pay to align with prior compensation levels.

Importantly, this incident response premium pay is explicitly stated as not being part of basic pay for most purposes, including retirement calculations or lump-sum leave payments. In addition to pay enhancements, the legislation mandates paid rest and recuperation leave for wildland firefighters following their deployment to qualifying incidents. The Secretaries will jointly establish uniform policies for this leave, which must be used immediately after an incident and cannot be accrued or paid out.

The provisions for special base rates and premium pay will take effect after the expiration of temporary federal wildland firefighter salary increases previously authorized by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and subsequent continuing appropriations acts. To ensure the uninterrupted continuation of these salary increases, the bill authorizes the transfer of up to $5,000,000 in unobligated funds from the Forest Service's wildland fire management budget to the Department of the Interior's equivalent program.