How Much to Charge for Security Guard Services
And Keep the Margin You Priced

Security firms in most US markets charge $22 to $35 an hour for an unarmed post and $30 to $50 an hour for an armed one. That band is the short answer to how much to charge for security guard services, and the rate inside it normally lands between one and a half and two times what you pay the officer.

The floor matters more than the ceiling. Anything under about $20 an hour for unarmed coverage cannot pay a legal wage and still carry payroll taxes, workers compensation and liability insurance. A competitor quoting below that is either not carrying the insurance or not intending to make money.

How much do security companies charge clients?

Security companies charge clients between $22 and $60 an hour, and the post decides where inside that you sit. Rates move with what the work asks of the officer, not only with the city.

Three things push you to the top of a band. A metro wage floor, a risk level that raises your insurance, and the hours nobody wants. Overnight, weekend and holiday coverage commonly adds 10 to 20 percent.

The wage underneath all of it is public. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median security guard wage at $18.28 an hour. So a $30 rate on a median-wage unarmed post is not a fat margin. It is roughly one and a half times the wage, and the wage is the first of four numbers you have to cover.

Why can't I bill a client for a guard's overtime hour?

You pay fifty percent more for that hour and bill exactly the same. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, hours past 40 in a week are paid at no less than one and a half times the regular rate, which the Department of Labor sets out in Fact Sheet #23. Your contract names one rate per post hour and knows nothing about any of it.

Take one armed post for the rest of this page. One officer on a gate, twelve hours a night, seven nights a week. That is 84 post hours, billing at $43.00 an hour, on a $26.00 wage.

Cover it with two officers at 42 hours each and four of those hours are premium every week. That is the roster almost everybody runs.

That is the security guard overtime premium, and nobody reimburses it. $60.84 a week is $3,164 a year off one post, on a schedule nobody in your office would look at twice.

And that is the quiet version, where nothing goes wrong.

Now one officer calls off a twelve hour night. Your supervisor rings the other one, who is already at 42 hours, so all twelve hours are premium and the call costs $182.52. That is a third of what the post earns you in a week, spent in a four minute phone call at half past five in the morning.

Nobody writes it down. It surfaces on the payroll register, on the one day of the month when the number can be read and no longer changed. Two officers on a seven-night post is the roster I refuse to sign off, and that phone call is why. The same premium arithmetic on any other wage is worked through in how to calculate overtime pay.

How to calculate a security guard bill rate, step by step

A security guard bill rate is built out of your own cost, never copied off somebody else’s quote. Add your costs in order, then divide the total by one minus your target margin.

Your security guard cost per hour is four numbers stacked on each other. The wage, the taxes and insurance riding on that wage, your overhead once you spread it over the hours you actually bill, then your margin on top.

Most owners can name the first and guess the last. The two in the middle cannot be looked up anywhere, which is why two firms quote the same gate on the same street four dollars apart and neither of them is being greedy. Each number below is produced by the one above it, so swap in your own as you read.

Step four is the one people fudge. Divide your overhead by the hours you actually bill, not the hours you sold. Forty officers averaging 42 hours bills 1,680 hours a week, so $6,300 of supervisors, dispatchers, office staff, vehicles, phones and software is $3.75 an hour.

Count it low and you have priced a loss and called it a win. I would rather overstate my overhead by fifty cents than find it in the accounts in March.

So the post bills at $43.00 against a cost to serve of $36.51. That is $6.49 of margin an hour, $545.16 a week, and $28,348 a year on one post.

How many guards to cover a 12 hour post, seven nights a week

Three, and the two-officer roster is what puts the premium on the post in the first place. Eighty-four hours divided by forty is 2.1. Two people cannot cover the post without somebody crossing the line, so the premium is not bad luck. It is built into the roster.

Put three officers on at about 28 hours each and nobody reaches 40. You also get the thing a two-officer roster never has: a rested third person to call when one of the other two goes sick.

I would add that third officer long before I went back to a client asking for a rate increase. One is a conversation with your scheduler. The other is a negotiation you can lose.

How to price a security guard contract so overtime cannot eat the margin

Three moves work, and only one of them is entirely in your hands. Every security guard contract pricing model in real use is one of these three, or it is the fourth option of hoping.

Price the premium into the rate. Move the overtime you know the post will run onto the cost side before you divide by your margin. Spreading $60.84 across 84 post hours adds 72 cents an hour, which is cheap insurance on a post you already know runs hot.

Get an overtime clause into the contract. It names a separate rate for hours past 40, or for coverage the client asks for at short notice, which suits event work where the extra hours are visibly the client’s own doing. It does not suit a standing post, because no buyer alive signs a clause that lets your roster decide the size of their invoice.

Stop the 41st hour being scheduled. Cover the same 84 hours with three officers, then hold that line with something that refuses the shift rather than reporting on it. This is the one I would run on every steady post, and it is the only one of the three that still works when somebody calls off.

Building that three-officer roster across seven nights is its own piece of work, and it is what AI scheduling for security companies is for.

What scheduling software stops a guard going over 40 hours at one site?

XShift AI stops it, and it stops it by refusing the shift rather than reporting on it. Every other scheduling tool tells you. It does not stop you.

You write the ceiling in a line of your own. Name the client site and only that site is weighed against the number. Leave the site out and the ceiling holds across everything you run.

Set the number in wages, not in billings, because wages are what you control. Eighty-four hours at $26.00 is $2,184 of wages a week on that post.

After that, every shift at that site is priced before it is allowed to exist. It totals what the officers on it are paid, applies time and a half to any hour past your own overtime threshold, adds what the site has already committed that week, and refuses the shift when the total goes over your number. The same sentence works as a daily ceiling.

Labor at Harbor Terminal can never
go over $2,184 in a week

Nobody goes over 40 hours in a week

The gap between those two lines is the whole page. Marcus was already at 42 hours, so his twelve hours price at $39.00 and cost the post $468. The third officer prices at $26.00 and costs $312.

That $156 gap is the premium, and it is what tips the post over its ceiling. Which means a wage ceiling catches overtime without you writing a single word about overtime.

Hours are counted across every site an officer works, because overtime is a weekly thing and not a site thing. So an officer doing three nights at your terminal and one at your hospital contract arrives at the 41st hour with all four counted. The rest of the ceilings that stop that hour being created sit in how to reduce overtime costs.

When somebody calls off, coverage works down the list of officers allowed to take the shift and asks the ones who would stay under 40 first. It will use an officer who goes into overtime rather than leave a post empty, because an empty post loses the contract. A written ceiling changes that, because anybody who would break it is taken out of the coverage list entirely. So the night goes to your third officer instead of your most tired one.

One thing to know about typing a shift in by hand. Your written ceilings do run on that path and will refuse the save. Availability does not, so look at the officer’s own week before you commit anybody. Every refusal is kept with the dollars it turned away, on a running total you can read on the Autopilot screen at any point in the month.

To stop security guard overtime you have to stop the shift, and a labor budget per client site is the sentence that does it. See a ceiling refuse a live shift on a demo, or read what else Autopilot holds as a plain sentence.

XShift AI is $29 a month with your first active user included and $1 a month for each one after, so 40 officers is $68 a month. That is less than half of one call-off covered by the wrong officer. The pricing is one line, and the rest of what security guard scheduling software should do for your week is on the security page.

Security guard pricing questions

Pick your busiest post, work out its cost to serve, then start your free trial and write the weekly ceiling that protects it as one plain sentence.