What a security guard post actually costs per year

Where these numbers come from

Every wage figure on this page is published by a government statistical agency, and every one of them is checkable. That matters here, because the pages currently ranking for “security guard cost calculator” in both the US and Canada are articles with static tables — and the wage figures in them are not dated.

United States — Bureau of Labor Statistics

Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics for SOC 33-9032, Security Guards, reference period May 2025, retrieved 2026-07-26. Nationally that is 1,283,470 guards employed at a mean of $20.42/hour ($42,470 a year) and a median of $18.28/hour.

State figures come straight from the BLS public API, so you can re-run the exact query behind any US number on this page. For California that series is OEUS060000000000033903203. Post it to api.bls.gov/publicAPI/v2/timeseries/data/ and you should get the same figure back.

Canada — Job Bank / Statistics Canada

Wages for NOC 64410 from the Job Bank wage report, drawn from the Labour Force Survey and last updated 2025-11-19 (transcribed 2026-07-26). Job Bank publishes a low, median and high rather than a mean, so the Canadian side of this calculator defaults to the median and shows the range beside it.

The hours

A post covered around the clock is 8,760 hours a year — 365 × 24. You will sometimes see 8,736 instead, which is 52 weeks × 168 hours; both are defensible and the difference is a rounding artefact of how the year is counted. Anything short of 24/7 is counted as hours per week × 52.

Covering 168 hours a week takes 4.2 full-time employees (168 ÷ 40). Real rosters need an absence and relief factor on top of that — usually 1.2 to 1.3 — which is why a genuinely covered 24/7 post is closer to five people than four.

What this calculator will not do

It will not tell you a guard is always the wrong answer. Set the coverage to business hours and put forty cameras on the monitoring side and the arithmetic goes the other way — the page will say so. A guard can do things a camera and an operator cannot: open a door, escort someone to their car, take a delivery.

What remote monitoring changes is the cost of presence after hours, which is where the 8,760-hour number does its damage. And it changes the continuity problem: an operator who leaves is replaced without your site having to teach anyone anything.

Sourcing and caveats

• Wages, US: BLS OEWS, SOC 33-9032, May 2025 — bls.gov. Retrieved 2026-07-26 via the BLS public API.
• Wages, Canada: Job Bank / Statistics Canada LFS, NOC 64410, updated 2025-11-19. Some territorial estimates use StatCan Small Area Estimation.
• Turnover: 77% for security services in 2024, against 69.3% in 2019 — ASIS International. Contract security firms specifically report 100–300%.
• Burden and markup: the mandatory employer layer runs 20–35% across staffing sources; bill rates run 1.5–2.0× wage. Both are ranges, and the defaults here sit mid-range. They are a starting point, not a claim about your vendor.
• Monitoring pricing: vendor-published market ranges, not audited figures and not a Blinkless quote — $50–150 per camera per month is the common band.
• Workers' compensation: class code 7720 (security and patrol agencies). Rates are filed per state; Florida's 2025 rate is $2.83 per $100 of payroll. Yours will differ.

This is an estimate built from public data, not a quote, and not financial or insurance advice. Your actual contract will depend on your site, your hours and your vendor.