911 funding and the transition to NG911

How 911 is paid for

Unlike universal service, 911 has no federal fee and no central fund. It is financed primarily by state and local surcharges — the small “911” or “E911” line items on landline, wireless, and VoIP bills — often supplemented by state or local general revenue. The result is a genuinely fragmented funding base: surcharge amounts, what they may be spent on, and how they are collected all vary widely from state to state.

The operational unit that funding supports is the PSAP (Public Safety Answering Point) — the call center that answers 911 calls and dispatches police, fire, or medical response. PSAPs are operated and funded at the state and local level, which is why 911 capability is uneven across the country.

Fee diversion

Because 911 fees are collected by states, some states spend a portion of them on things other than 911. Under the NET 911 Act — reinforced by the Don’t Break Up the T-Band Act of 2020, which directed the FCC to define what counts as diversion — the FCC reports to Congress annually, naming the states and territories that divert. The rules also carry consequences: an identified diverter can be barred from FCC advisory committees, and a 911 Fee Diversion Strike Force was stood up to press the issue.

The most recent report — the Seventeenth Annual Report (released February 2026, covering 2024) — identified three jurisdictions: New Jersey, New York, and Nevada, which together diverted roughly $225 million, about 5 percent of all 911 fees collected nationwide. The concentration is stark: New Jersey diverted more than 80 percent of the 911 fees it collected, and New York over 40 percent, while the Nevada figure reflected local jurisdictions rather than the state itself. New York and New Jersey are the perennial names — they recur in the report year after year. Diversion is a recurring pressure point precisely because it drains money the system needs as it faces the cost of modernizing.

What NG911 is

Next Generation 911 (NG911) is the replacement for the legacy, circuit-switched 911 system — the emergency-calling face of the same TDM-to-IP transition reshaping the rest of the network. Its reference design is NENA’s i3 standard (NENA-STA-010), which specifies an all-IP architecture built on two layers:

• The ESInet (Emergency Services IP network) — a managed “network of networks” shared by public-safety agencies that replaces the legacy selective-router trunks with IP transport.
• Next Generation Core Services (NGCS) — the software services that ride on the ESInet and actually route calls. The key functional elements are the ESRP (the routing engine that applies policy rules), the ECRF (which uses the caller’s actual location plus local GIS data to pick the correct destination PSAP), and a location-validation function, sitting behind security and logging elements.

The payoff over legacy 911 is threefold: location-based routing (routing on where the caller actually is, not on a fixed trunk assignment), text and multimedia to the PSAP (text-to-911, and the capacity for images and video), and resilience — policy-based routing lets PSAPs back each other up, load-balance, and fail over during outages or surges instead of being locked to rigid trunk assignments.

The funding gap

The obstacle to NG911 is money, not technology. A 2026 NTIA cost study put the remaining nationwide transition at roughly $5.8 to $9.3 billion over about seven years — down from the 2018 estimate as more than $4.5 billion has already been invested through 911 fees and state and local funds, and as costs shift from one-time capital toward recurring cloud and software subscriptions.

Against a state-by-state fee base — with diversion still draining some of it — there is no enacted, dedicated nationwide NG911 fund. Federal grant funding has been sporadic: the 2012 Middle Class Tax Relief Act created a one-time NTIA/NHTSA grant program that awarded on the order of $100 million, and repeated efforts to attach a large one-time NG911 investment (proposals ran from $10 to $15 billion) to spectrum legislation never became law. The 2025 spectrum-auction reauthorization restored the FCC’s auction authority but earmarked none of the proceeds for NG911. A Next Generation 9-1-1 Act (H.R. 6505 / S. 4062) is pending in the current Congress — but, tellingly, the refiled version omits a specific dollar figure, and it has not been enacted.

Why it matters for the transition

NG911 is where the IP transition meets life-safety. As carriers retire TDM, the emergency-calling system has to move with them — but it is funded by the most fragmented mechanism of any obligation on the network, and the entities that answer 911 calls are the least able to self-finance a wholesale upgrade. That mismatch — an IP-native obligation on a legacy, uneven funding base — is why 911 gets its own panel every time the FCC convenes on the transition.