This paper sets out to measure the technical efficiency of the fire services in those Spanish provincial capitals or cities which have a population of more than 50,000. The aim is to investigate the productive efficiency of a local public service which has not been the subject of study in the economic literature of our country. Whilst the application of data envelopment analysis and of deterministic and stochastic frontier models produces disparate results due to the different nature of each method, it nevertheless provide us with an indication of the relative level of efficiency of each unit. Our analysis reveals that there is a wide margin for optimising the use of resources and shows which fire services better manage their available productive factors.

Keywords: technical efficiency, frontier models, local public sector.