A 24/7 guard post in California
$322,121
per year, fully loaded
| Billable hours a year | 8,760 |
|---|---|
| Wage assumed | $21.60/hr |
| Wage + employer burden | $27.65/hr |
| Bill rate you pay | $36.77/hr1.70× wage |
| Scheduled hours | $322,121 |
| Guard total | $322,121 |
| Remote monitoring, same site | $9,600 |
| Difference a year | $312,521 less |
| Over five years | $1,562,605 less |
4.2 full-time guards staff this coverage.
At the industry turnover rate of 77% (ASIS International's 2024 figure, up from 69.3% before the pandemic), about 3.2 of them will leave within the year. Whoever learns your site in March may not be there in September. None of that shows up in the hourly rate.
Where these numbers come from
Every wage figure on this page comes from a government statistical agency and carries its date. The pages ranking for “security guard cost calculator” in the US and Canada are articles with static, undated tables; here you can trace each number back to its source and get the same figure out.
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. Across the US 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'll sometimes see 8,736 instead, which is 52 weeks × 168 hours; both are defensible and the difference is a rounding artefact of how you count the year. Anything short of 24/7 counts as hours per week × 52.
Covering 168 hours a week takes 4.2 full-time employees (168 ÷ 40). Real rosters add an absence and relief factor of 1.2 to 1.3 on top, so real coverage of a 24/7 post takes closer to five people than four.
What this calculator won't do
It won't tell you a guard is the wrong answer for your site. Set the coverage to business hours and put forty cameras on the monitoring side and the arithmetic goes the other way, and the page will say so. A guard can do things a camera and an operator cannot: open a door, escort someone to their car.
Remote monitoring changes the cost of presence after hours, which is where the 8,760-hour number does its damage, and it removes the continuity problem: when an operator leaves, the monitoring company replaces them and you don't have to teach the new one your site.
The research on cameras and guards
The largest evaluation of video surveillance, a 40-year systematic review of 76 studies across nine countries (Piza, Welsh, Farrington & Thomas 2019, Criminology & Public Policy), found CCTV associated with a modest but significant 13% reduction in crime overall, rising to about 37% in car parks and parking facilities, the strongest setting studied. The effect shows up in property and vehicle crime; the review found no significant effect on violent crime, and this page makes no claim that it does.
One finding carries the most weight here: schemes with live monitoring produced significant crime reductions, and record-only systems did not. The successful car-park schemes also combined monitored cameras with lighting and signage across close to the whole facility, so the watched, well-designed scheme is what earns the result. That squares with the deterrence literature: Nagin (2013) concludes that certainty of apprehension deters where severity of punishment does not, and a camera someone watches and responds to raises that certainty.
Watching screens is hard work. In a peer-reviewed experiment (Näsholm, Rohlfing & Sauer 2014, PLOS ONE), 66% of participants missed a salient unexpected event on the screen they were monitoring, and operators with an average of five years of CCTV experience did no better than novices. The human-factors literature (Warm, Parasuraman & Matthews 2008, Human Factors) concludes sustained vigilance is effortful and degrades with time on task. Modern remote monitoring answers this with detection triggers and verified response instead of a person staring at a wall of monitors, and the same limit applies to a lone guard at hour ten of an overnight shift.
The guard post also carries a human cost the hourly rate hides. Federal data (BJS/BLS/NIOSH, Indicators of Workplace Violence, 2022; 2015–19 data) put nonfatal workplace violence against security guards at 95 incidents per 1,000 workers a year, against 8 per 1,000 for all workers, about twelve times the rate and behind only corrections officers. That exposure is part of what you pay for in the workers' compensation line above.
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 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're a starting point; your vendor's numbers will differ.
- Monitoring pricing: vendor-published market ranges, unaudited; $50–150 per camera per month is the common band, and a Blinkless quote is separate.
- CCTV effectiveness: Piza, Welsh, Farrington & Thomas (2019), “CCTV surveillance for crime prevention: A 40-year systematic review with meta-analysis,” Criminology & Public Policy 18(1), 135–159: 13% overall, 37% in car parks; active monitoring significant, passive not; no effect on violent crime. Retrieved 2026-08-04.
- Deterrence: Nagin (2013), “Deterrence in the Twenty-First Century,” Crime and Justice 42(1), 199–263: certainty of apprehension deters, severity does not.
- Operator attention: Näsholm, Rohlfing & Sauer (2014), PLOS ONE 9(1): e86157; Warm, Parasuraman & Matthews (2008), Human Factors 50(3), 433–441. We don't cite the “operators miss 95% after 22 minutes” figure that circulates in vendor marketing; it traces to no study we could find.
- Guard workplace violence: BJS/BLS/NIOSH, Indicators of Workplace Violence, 2019 (published 2022), Table 5.1: 95.0 vs 8.0 nonfatal violent crimes per 1,000 workers, 2015–19 average.
- 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. It is not a quote, and it is not financial or insurance advice. Your actual contract will depend on your site and your vendor.
Frequently asked questions
How much does it cost to hire a security guard?
Hiring through a contract security firm costs the bill rate: 1.5 to 2.0 times the guard's wage after employer burden, supervision, overhead and margin. At the US national mean wage of $20.42 per hour (May 2025, Bureau of Labor Statistics), that comes to about $34.76 per hour, $25,377 a month for around-the-clock coverage, or $304,524 a year. The cost of hiring a security guard for your business comes down to two inputs, the hours you cover and your state's wage, so set both in the calculator above for a local figure.
How much does a security guard cost per hour?
Security guards in the United States earned a mean of $20.42 per hour in May 2025 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, SOC 33-9032), but the buyer pays the contractor's bill rate rather than the wage: 1.5 to 2.0 times the wage after employer taxes, workers' compensation, benefits, supervision, overhead and margin. At this calculator's sourced defaults, the national mean wage produces a bill rate of about $34.76 per hour. State mean wages range from $15.06 in West Virginia to $29.19 in District of Columbia, so pick your state in the calculator for a local figure.
How much does a security guard cost per month?
At this calculator's sourced national defaults, a 24/7 guard post runs about $25,377 per month, while a business-hours post (8 hours a day, weekdays only) runs about $6,026 per month at the same wage. Monthly cost tracks hours of coverage more than any other input, so set the coverage preset first, then pick your state or province; the page shows the monthly arithmetic behind the number.
How much does a 24/7 security guard cost per year?
A post covered around the clock is 8,760 hours a year (365 × 24). At the US national mean wage of $20.42 per hour and this calculator's sourced default burden and overhead, that works out to about $304,524 a year for a single post. The figure moves with your state's wage and with anything you change in the calculator; each component is editable and shown on screen.
Why is the bill rate so much higher than the guard's wage?
The wage is only the first layer. Employer burden (payroll taxes, unemployment insurance, workers' compensation, paid leave and benefits) adds 20–35% on top of it, and the contractor's field supervision, recruiting, general overhead and operating margin add about another third. Built up from those sourced components the multiplier comes out near 1.70× the wage, which matches a real 2025 US contract billed at $32.00 per hour against a $19.13 per hour wage, a multiplier of 1.67. The calculator shows each step of that build-up.
How many guards does it take to staff one 24/7 post?
Covering 168 hours a week takes 4.2 full-time employees (168 ÷ 40), and real rosters add an absence and relief factor of 1.2–1.3, putting real coverage of a 24/7 post closer to five people. At the security industry's 77% annual turnover rate (ASIS International, 2024), about three of the guards staffing that post will leave within the year; whoever learns your site in March may not be there in September.
How much does a security guard cost in Canada?
Job Bank (Statistics Canada Labour Force Survey, NOC 64410, updated 2025-11-19) puts the national median at CA$21.00 per hour, in a range of CA$16.55 to CA$31.45. Medians run from CA$17.00 in Nova Scotia to CA$26.68 in Yukon. The same wage-to-bill-rate logic applies, with the Canadian statutory stack (CPP, EI, provincial payroll tax and workers' compensation) in place of the US one. Switch the calculator to Canada for a figure in Canadian dollars for your province.
Is remote video monitoring cheaper than a security guard?
For after-hours coverage, in most cases, and this page will say when it is not. Published market rates for monitored cameras run $50–150 per camera per month, so a typical eight-camera site is around $9,600 a year, against six figures for a 24/7 guard post. Set the coverage to business hours and put enough cameras on the monitoring side and the arithmetic goes the other way. The monitoring column uses published market ranges; Blinkless quotes each site on its own.
Do security cameras reduce crime?
Yes, with two important qualifications. A 40-year systematic review of 76 evaluations (Piza, Welsh, Farrington & Thomas, 2019, in Criminology & Public Policy) found CCTV associated with a significant 13% reduction in crime overall, rising to about 37% in car parks and parking facilities. First qualification: the effect appears in property and vehicle crime; the review found none in violent crime. Second: schemes with live monitoring produced significant reductions and record-only systems did not, which is the peer-reviewed case for monitoring cameras rather than recording alone.
Where does the wage data on this page come from?
US wages are Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics for SOC 33-9032 (Security Guards), reference period May 2025, pulled from the BLS public API; the page shows the series ID behind each state figure so you can re-run the exact query. Canadian wages are the Job Bank wage report for NOC 64410, drawn from the Statistics Canada Labour Force Survey and last updated 2025-11-19. Every figure on the page carries its source and date.
Want the real number for your site?
Send us what you modelled and we'll quote the monitoring side: cameras, hours, response, the lot.
Or call (212) 470-2511.