Security guard cost per hour
Security guard cost per hour varies by region, level of training and contract terms, and no single figure holds across markets, which is why this guide explains the arithmetic rather than quoting a rate. The true cost of guard coverage goes far beyond the hourly rate: it includes overtime, benefits, training, supervision, and the several full-time people needed for genuine round-the-clock coverage.
How to work out your real hourly cost
The hourly rates above are the starting point, not the answer. The rate a guarding contractor quotes is a billed rate, not your cost of coverage, and the gap between the two is where security budgets get missed. Rates also move with local labor markets and licensing regimes, so treat any published figure, including ours, as indicative and confirm it with two or three quotes in your own market.
Start with the billed hourly rate from your contractor, then account for the four things it usually excludes:
- Shift loading. Nights, weekends and public holidays carry a premium in most markets. A site needing genuine 24/7 cover pays a blended rate well above the daytime headline.
- Coverage ratio. One guarded post is not one guard. Allowing for leave, sickness, training and breaks, continuous cover of a single post typically requires four to five people on the roster — so the annual cost of a post is a multiple of one salary.
- Turnover. Guarding has high churn. Recruitment, vetting, site induction and the productivity cost of a guard who does not yet know the site are recurring, not one-off.
- Supervision and admin. Rostering, contract management, incident reporting and audits consume management time that never appears on the contractor invoice.
As an order of magnitude, a single staffed post covering one eight-hour shift every day of the year commonly lands in the tens of thousands of dollars annually, and genuine round-the-clock cover of the same post is roughly three times that before supervision. Those are the figures used in the ROI calculator, which lets you substitute your own rate rather than an industry average.
Rates vary widely by country, by licensing regime and by whether the officer is armed, so confirm your own market with two or three contractor quotes before building a business case. What does not vary is the structure of the calculation above, and that the routine patrol round, the part virtual patrolling replaces, is the largest single consumer of those paid hours.