Security guard cost calculator

How to use this security guard cost calculator

Pick unarmed, armed, or mobile patrol. Choose a schedule, or type the hours you actually need. Set how many officers stand the post at the same time, then pick a contract length. Patrols use visits per night and nights per week instead of a hourly post. The range updates as you change a field. Hit Reset to go back to one unarmed officer on business hours for six months.

Read the assumptions under the range before you send the number to a boss or a board. The model uses the bands in our tools config. It rounds to the nearest $50. It does not know your holiday calendar, your union rules, or the extra time an officer spends on a report after the shift.

What actually moves the price

Armed coverage costs more than unarmed coverage because the officer, the equipment, and the supervision are different. A firearm on a post is not a toggle we flip to look serious. We use it when the site, the goods, and the license call for it. Armed guards and unarmed guards are different jobs even when the hours match.

Hours matter more than a headline rate. Forty hours at a front desk is not the same purchase as 168 hours, which is a full week with no gap. Overnight posts are long and quiet, and they still need a relief plan so one person is not awake for a week. If you type a custom number, use the hours the site is actually open or actually empty, not a round number that looks tidy.

Two officers on the same post doubles the labor. That is the right move when one person cannot see the door and the yard, or when the post needs a break and the door cannot sit empty. It is the wrong move when the second officer has no duties. Contract length changes the total because a one-month fill-in is priced differently from a year. Holidays, special events, and extra reports sit outside this band. So does a supervisor who is not already counted as one of the officers on post.

A mobile patrol is not a cheaper version of a standing officer. You are buying visits. Three visits a night, seven nights, is 21 stops. Each stop has a drive, a walk, and a note. If the site needs someone there the whole night, a patrol will look cheap in this tool and then fail the job.

How the range is calculated

For a standing post, weekly low equals hours times officers times the low hourly band. Weekly high uses the high band. Monthly multiplies the rounded weekly figures by 4.33. The contract total multiplies that month by the number of months, then by a factor that is slightly lower on longer contracts in the current placeholder model. Patrols swap hours for visits per week and use a per-visit band. Every figure is then rounded to the nearest $50.

Those bands are placeholders until we mark the rates as confirmed. Do not publish them as our price. When you want a number we will put on a proposal, request an exact quote and tell us the address, the hours, and what the officer is supposed to do.

A worked example

A north Austin warehouse wants one unarmed officer, weekdays, about 40 hours. The buyer first asks for 24/7 because the yard looks big at night. On a walk-through the real problem is the open gate from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., not a lobby during the day. We would not sell 168 hours to solve an 84-hour problem. The calculator makes that gap obvious: change the schedule and the month changes before anyone argues about the hourly rate.

If that same yard has had trailer break-ins, the next question is armed or unarmed, and whether a few patrol stops cover the fence line better than a chair in the guard shack. The tool will not make that call. It will show you the two bills side by side so the operations meeting can.

Common mistakes

• Comparing an hourly rate and ignoring how many hours the site is uncovered.
• Counting one officer for a campus that takes forty minutes to walk.
• Treating a patrol price as if someone is standing the door between visits.
• Leaving out holidays and then acting surprised in December.
• Sending the placeholder band to a client as if it were our quote.

Questions we hear

• Unarmed guard service in Texas
• Armed guard service in Texas
• Request an exact quote
• Contact the Austin office