AFAIK in Spain is all professional. We do have an emergencies military unit too (UME - Unidad Militar de Emergencias) which does mostly firefighting and disaster relief. The military also can build hospitals and such, and it happened under the pandemic, but it's not the UME but something else.

Small municipalities pool their resources, at least around my area.

The only voluntary service we have is the Red Cross and Protección Civil.

I'm not 100% sure on this, but professional emergency services are definitely common.

> AFAIK volunteer firefighting is the rule everywhere in Europe.

I've got a friend who's an occasional firefighter in Belgium, in addition to his regular job. He's not an unpaid volunteer: I don't know how it works exactly regarding the pay but I know that once he'll reach the age where he'll stop working, he'll get two monthly pensions paid (the regular one + one because he was a firefighter).

In France they get paid hourly rates, with +50% for Sundays and holidays and +100% for nights.

Of note: they're not paid, they're compensated.

Which is why only officers have a base comp' above the minimum legal salary, the lowest rank gets 8.08 (euros) (the minimum legal salary is 10.25), but it's tax-free.

And that's on active duty (which doesn't necessarily mean on-site, it might be training or admin or whatever), when on-call it's generally half-that (legally anyway, some places give volunteers more).

Ah, interesting. I only knew that in France firemen are part of the military, I thought it was that way all over France.

About 5% of the firemen in France are part of the military. The most well known being those of Paris and Marseille.

Possibly I'm biased by a former French firefighter who lives a few houses away and likes to tell stories from his service. He was with the military firefighters...