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Security guards

Also called Security officer, Unarmed security guard, Armed security guard, Loss prevention officer, Site security officer

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 1,283,470 US security guards, with median pay of $38,020 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2012, the May 2025 count is the highest. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 35,000 from 1900, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for security guards: Knightscope K5 + Cobalt Robotics, 2016 to 2024.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to change +0.9% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

  • 25% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023
  • 0.84 estimated probability that the whole occupation could be computerised, over an unspecified number of years. Not a forecast of job losses. Frey and Osborne, 2013

Since the 2013 prediction

In 2013, Frey and Osborne put this job's probability of computerisation at 0.84. BLS counted 1,066,730 of these jobs in May 2013 and 1,283,470 in May 2025 (+20%, a change derived by Future History).

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.

Last updated .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Security guards: jobs and pay since 1900 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/33-9032

Chicago

Future History. "Security guards: jobs and pay since 1900." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/33-9032.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_33_9032, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Security guards: jobs and pay since 1900}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/33-9032}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

drag to travel through time
1850187519001925195019752000now
Country
2026
Known then as Pinkerton detective / railroad police / special agent (industrial era)
Known then as Industrial guard / plant guard / company police (Homestead-to-WWII era)
Known then as Contract security officer / guard (Burns / Pinkerton / Wackenhut era)
Known then as Security officer / security guard (industry consolidation era)
Known then as Security Guards (BLS SOC 33-9032)
Known today as Security Guards (BLS SOC 33-9032)
Projected to still be called Security Guards (BLS SOC 33-9032)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
1.28M
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$38,020
Est.

≈ $37,045 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1850

Allan Pinkerton, a Scottish-born cooper who had stumbled into detective work in the Chicago area, founds the North-Western Police Agency with attorney Edward Rucker around 1850: soon renamed Pinkerton's National Detective Agency. The "We Never Sleep" motto and the unblinking-eye logo become the most recognized brand in American private law enforcement. The railroads, which move payroll and valuables across hundreds of miles of unpoliced territory, become Pinkerton's most important clients. By the 1870s and 1880s, at the height of its power, Pinkerton employs more agents than the United States Army has soldiers. The agency's business model (trained agents deployed wherever clients need them, under centralized management, for a fee) is the template on which the entire modern private-security industry is built.

Beat · 1892

July 6, 1892: Carnegie Steel management, directed by Henry Clay Frick, sends 300 Pinkerton agents by barge to the Carnegie plant at Homestead, Pennsylvania, to break a strike by the Amalgamated Association of Steel and Iron Workers. Armed workers are waiting on the riverbank. The battle lasts twelve hours; seven workers and three Pinkerton agents are killed; twenty-three others are wounded. The Homestead Strike becomes a defining event in American labor history, private guards as the armed instrument of industrial capital, and the image it creates shadows the profession for generations. Congress passes the Anti-Pinkerton Act in 1893, prohibiting the federal government from hiring agents from any organization that supplies armed guards for hire.

Beat · 1955

ASIS International, originally the American Society for Industrial Security, is founded in 1955 to professionalize the newly emerging field of industrial security. The organization seeks to unite government and corporate security practitioners, become a focal point for education, research, and certification, and establish the security professional as something more than a uniformed laborer. ASIS grows into the largest professional security membership organization in the world, by the 2020s it represents security practitioners across public and private sectors, from entry-level guards to Chief Security Officers. Its founding marks the industry's first serious attempt to credentialize itself: to turn "guard" into a profession.

Beat · 1982

By 1982, the private security industry has become a $3.3 billion industry: Burns International holds a $250 million share, second to Pinkerton's $300 million. More significantly, by the early 1980s private security guards have crossed the threshold of outnumbering sworn law enforcement officers in the United States for the first time. Robert B. Reich, writing in 1991, cites comparable numbers between private guards and public police by the late 1980s and attributes the growth to "the withdrawal of the affluent from existing communities." By the late 1990s, private guards exceed sworn officers by 50%. This structural dominance (more private guards than public police, persistently for four decades) is the defining demographic fact of the American security landscape.

Beat · 2001

September 11, 2001: the terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon instantly transform the way corporate America thinks about physical security. Employment in the security guards and patrol services industry spikes immediately after 9/11; enrollment in security certification programs escalates; companies that had treated security as a minimum-cost line item begin treating it as a strategic function. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics subsequently finds that the surge was followed by contraction: the number of security guards fell by approximately 124,000 (11%) between 1999 and 2003, as employers recognized that panic hiring had outpaced genuine threat assessments and began cutting costs. The longer-term legacy of 9/11 is not a permanent headcount increase but a structural elevation of the security function within organizations: guards earn slightly better pay, require more training, and report higher in the org chart than they did before the attacks.

Beat · 2016

Two companies founded in the same year, on opposite coasts, begin deploying autonomous robots into the places where security guards had previously walked their rounds. Cobalt Robotics (Fremont, California) builds indoor patrol robots for corporate offices and warehouses; Verkada (Menlo Park, California) deploys cloud-connected AI camera systems that watch for loitering, unauthorized access, and license plates without a human monitor at the screen. These are not science fiction: within six years, Cobalt robots are patrolling the lobbies of FedEx and Yelp offices; Verkada cameras are watching over thousands of buildings at a $3.2 billion valuation. Also in 2016: AlliedBarton and Universal Services of America merge to form Allied Universal, creating the largest private employer in North America after Walmart and Amazon, with 800,000 global employees. The industry's two poles, massive human labor at scale and emerging autonomous substitution, are established in the same year.

Beat · 2022

January 27, 2022: Knightscope, the Mountain View company that makes the K5 outdoor patrol robot (a five-foot, 400-pound wheeled machine with cameras, thermal sensors, and a microphone array) completes its IPO. The stock opens on the Nasdaq under ticker KSCP. The K5 is priced at approximately $7-9 per hour to lease, below the minimum wage for a human guard in most states; Knightscope reports more than 10,000 total machines deployed at airports, parking garages, residential communities, hospitals, and corporate campuses. The K5 is not replacing guards wholesale at any site; it is replacing the most routine component of guard work, the patrol lap around a perimeter at 3 a.m., and leaving the rest. But the direction is unmistakable: the economics of autonomous patrol are approaching parity with the economics of minimum-wage guard labor.

Beat · 2024

BLS projects +2% employment growth for security guards 2023-2033, slower than average, while simultaneously projecting approximately 162,400 annual openings, driven almost entirely by the occupation's exceptional turnover rate. The median annual wage of $38,370 in May 2024 remains roughly half the median for sworn police officers ($74,000+): the structural wage gap that has defined the industry's economics since Pinkerton charged railroads a fraction of what a deputized police officer would cost. The 2024 security landscape is profoundly different from 1850: AI cameras watch every corner; patrol robots walk rounds at some of the largest campuses; algorithms flag anomalies before a human guard would notice them. What remains is the part that cannot be automated: the person who stands in the lobby and watches, the guard who makes the call when the person at the door is distressed rather than threatening, the presence that communicates by being there.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace security guards? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say
Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.
BLS Employment Projections 2025-35
→ 2035
+0.9%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 33-9032 (Security guards): 1,294.3 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 1,305.6 thousand in 2035, a change of +11.3 thousand (+0.9%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (0.7% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
Official statisticReport an error
How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)
Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.
Frey & Osborne (2013), "The Future of Employment"
2013 study · Probability of computerisation (2013 model)
84%
probability
What this measures

Published appendix value for SOC 2010 33-9032 Security Guards: probability of computerisation 0.84, rank 478 of 702 (rank 1 is least computerisable). Frey and Osborne estimated in 2013, with a Gaussian-process classifier on O*NET variables, how likely the whole occupation is to be technically automatable over "some unspecified number of years, perhaps a decade or two". It is a probability for the occupation, not a share of tasks and not a forecast of jobs lost.

Official statisticReport an error
Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
25%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 33-9032.00 Security Guards. Shown: human-rated β = 0.25, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0.167 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.333; GPT-4-rated β 0.167. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for security guards

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you hereWrite incident reports documenting occurrences during the shift, recording the time, location, parties involved, sequence of events, actions taken, and disposition of each incident, and submitting the completed report through an electronic security management platform for supervisor review and client records.

Write incident reports documenting occurrences during the shift, recording the time, location, parties involved, sequence of events, actions taken, and disposition of each incident, and submitting the completed report through an electronic security management platform for supervisor review and client records.[1],[11]

Where your edge is

Incident reporting is the task most exposed to AI assistance in the near term. Digital Guard Tour and platforms like TrackTik already auto-populate the time, location, checkpoint scans, and responding guard identity from GPS and NFC data: the guard only needs to describe what happened and what they did. Some platforms are beginning to use voice-to-text capture during the incident itself to reduce post-shift report writing time. The discipline that remains irreplaceable: describing the facts accurately in plain language, capturing the details that matter legally (exact time of contact, exact words used, whether the subject complied voluntarily), and flagging when an incident may have liability implications for the client. Write the report like a police officer would: who, what, where, when, how, no adjectives, no speculation, just documented observation.

AI is sitting alongside you hereMonitor AI-assisted video surveillance systems, watching live camera feeds aggregated in a video management system (VMS), reviewing AI-generated alerts for motion anomalies, loitering, perimeter breaches, or access violations, confirming true alarms and dismissing false positives, and dispatching a physical response or notifying emergency services when the alert is verified.

Monitor AI-assisted video surveillance systems, watching live camera feeds aggregated in a video management system (VMS), reviewing AI-generated alerts for motion anomalies, loitering, perimeter breaches, or access violations, confirming true alarms and dismissing false positives, and dispatching a physical response or notifying emergency services when the alert is verified.[1],[9],[12]

Where your edge is

Camera monitoring is the task most transformed by AI right now, and the biggest opportunity to move up. Verkada, Avigilon Unity, and Scylla AI filter false positives, which means the guards who can confidently use these platforms spend almost no time on phantom alarms and respond only to verified threats. Learn your VMS: what 'loitering' is configured to mean on your site, how Avigilon's Appearance Search works, and how to pull a multi-camera timeline for an incident investigation. Those skills are the same ones security directors say they cannot find enough of in 2025.

AI is sitting alongside you hereOperate as a remote monitoring officer, from a central station, monitoring camera feeds for multiple sites simultaneously using AI-assisted VMS dashboards, triaging AI-generated alerts, issuing verbal deterrence through site speakers, dispatching mobile patrol units or emergency services to confirmed incidents, and maintaining a shift log of all monitored events.

Operate as a remote monitoring officer, from a central station, monitoring camera feeds for multiple sites simultaneously using AI-assisted VMS dashboards, triaging AI-generated alerts, issuing verbal deterrence through site speakers, dispatching mobile patrol units or emergency services to confirmed incidents, and maintaining a shift log of all monitored events.[4],[13],[5]

Where your edge is

Remote monitoring officer is the highest-growth and highest-pay variant of the security guard role in 2025-2026. ASIS data shows AI-literate guards who can monitor many sites from a central operations center in higher demand than any other guard category. The role requires comfort operating multiple software interfaces simultaneously, the ability to triage AI alerts under time pressure, and clear verbal communication over speaker systems to deter threats at a distance. Pay is typically 20-40% above on-site guard rates for the same experience level, and the schedule (mostly indoor, no physical patrol) attracts guards who want longevity without the physical attrition. The fastest path to this role: get certified on Verkada, Avigilon, or Genetec platforms (vendor training programs exist for all three), and volunteer for any remote monitoring assignments your current employer offers.

Where security guards go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

What each move takes

A direction you could grow

Security Managers

Security Manager (SOC 11-3013.01) is the natural promotion trajectory for an experienced guard or security officer, typically requiring several years of field experience, a demonstrated track record of competent incident management, and increasingly a certification such as CPP (Certified Protection Professional) or PSP (Physical Security Professional) from ASIS International. Security managers oversee guard forces (many officers), manage vendor relationships for camera systems and access control, develop site security plans, conduct threat assessments, and interact directly with C-suite leadership on physical security strategy. The AI tools that augment frontline guard work (Verkada, Avigilon, Hakimo) are the same tools a security manager must be able to evaluate, procure, configure, and supervise, so guards who develop technical fluency with these platforms now are building exactly the skills that security director roles require in 2025-2026.

What you'd add
· ASIS Certified Protection Professional (CPP) or Physical Security Professional (PSP) certification
· Security operations management: guard scheduling, post orders, performance evaluation, progressive discipline
· Physical security technology: AI VMS configuration, access control system administration, alarm system management
· Threat and vulnerability assessment methodology: site surveys, risk registers, security plans
· Budget management and vendor contract negotiation for security services and equipment
What it takesSome new skills to pick up
Tools of the era

How has the work of security guards changed since 1850?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

  • Nightstick + lantern + whistle (the watchman's kit)

    The foundational equipment of the private security guard in the Pinkerton era was nearly identical to that of the public police officer: a wooden nightstick or baton, a kerosene or oil lantern for night rounds, a whistle to sound alarm over a city block's distance, and a notebook for recording the post log. What distinguished the Pinkerton agent or industrial guard from the lone night watchman was organizational backing: a central office, a uniform, a chain of command, and the implicit authority of a firm with national reach and a formidable reputation. The tool was the person; the organization was the multiplier.

    Effect on the work

    The Pinkerton model scaled private security from a solo-watchman model to an organized industry for the first time. By the 1880s, the agency employed more agents than the US Army had soldiers: entirely on the strength of organizational structure, not any new technology.

  • Watchclock guard-tour system (Newman / Detex, 1878 onward, patented 1901)

    The watchclock was an ingenious mechanical accountability device: a portable clock in a leather case, worn over the shoulder like a canteen, that punched a timestamp onto a paper tape whenever the guard inserted a unique key at a checkpoint box mounted on a wall, doorframe, or pole. A night watchman making rounds through a factory, office building, or warehouse would insert the key at each station, "punching the clock", and the device created an irrefutable paper record of the route and timing. Abraham A. Newman patented a landmark embossing mechanism in 1901; by 1902 insurance organizations had approved the system for verifying patrol logs. In 1923 the Detex Watchclock Corporation formed through merger and became the dominant manufacturer. The Guardsman model, introduced in the 1930s, could record many hours of patrol activity. Detex discontinued its last mechanical watchclocks in December 2011.

    Effect on the work

    The watchclock transformed security guard work from an honor-system occupation into a verifiable, auditable service. Insurance companies could now require proof of rounds; clients could see whether their overnight guard had actually walked the post or slept in the booth. It created the performance-management infrastructure of the industry a century before digital surveillance.

  • Two-way radio / walkie-talkie (post-WWII commercial deployment)

    World War II surplus radio technology entered the civilian market after 1945; Motorola leveraged its wartime experience to introduce the first transistorized portable radios in the mid-1950s. By the late 1950s, security companies were deploying handheld two-way radios to guards on patrol, enabling real-time communication with a central station for the first time. Before two-way radio, a guard on a large campus or industrial plant could go hours without communicating with anyone; the radio transformed the isolated overnight shift into a networked operation. The guard on post could now summon backup, report an incident, or be redirected from the central station in real time. This was the first technology that genuinely extended the reach of a security officer beyond the range of a whistle.

    Effect on the work

    Two-way radio improved incident response times and enabled fewer supervisors to manage larger guard forces; it also made the guard more accountable: the radio check-in replaced the physical watchclock punch as the primary presence-verification tool in many operations.

  • Analog CCTV + VCR recording (the monitor wall era)

    By the early 1970s, CCTV systems, closed-circuit television cameras connected by coaxial cable to monitors at a central security station, had become commercially viable for large commercial and industrial installations. Banks, retailers, and large office buildings began installing fixed cameras at entrances, vaults, and cash registers. The introduction of the VHS VCR in the late 1970s made continuous round-the-clock recording economically practical for the first time: a single VCR with a time-lapse adaptor could record many hours onto a single tape. By the 1980s, the "security guard monitoring a bank of CCTV screens" had become the defining image of the profession in popular culture. The analog CCTV era created a new specialty within security work (the monitor operator, sitting in a control room, scanning screens) and began the long process of shifting some of the guard's situational awareness from physical patrol to electronic surveillance.

    Effect on the work

    Analog CCTV began a decades-long substitution dynamic: cameras covered positions that previously required a guard's physical presence. A single monitor operator could watch feeds from a dozen cameras simultaneously, replacing up to a dozen fixed-post guards, though the quality of pre-digital footage made real-time threat detection difficult and evidence use unreliable.

  • IP camera + digital video recorder + access-control integration (the DVR era)

    The transition from analog CCTV to IP-based network cameras and digital video recorders (DVRs) through the 2000s transformed surveillance from a tape-archive function into a searchable, networked intelligence system. IP cameras transmitted over standard Ethernet; footage was stored on hard drives rather than VHS tapes; remote viewing from a laptop or smartphone became possible. Access-control systems (card readers, biometric scanners, electronic door locks) integrated with the video layer, creating the first unified physical security platforms. A single security operations center could now monitor multiple buildings or campuses from one location. The manpower required for routine camera monitoring fell; the scope of what a single guard could oversee from a desk expanded dramatically.

    Effect on the work

    IP camera deployments with DVR archival began significantly reducing the number of fixed-post guard positions at camera-saturated installations like retail chains, parking garages, and corporate campuses. Staffing models shifted toward fewer, more technically capable operators managing broader surveillance footprints.

  • AI cloud camera analytics: Verkada, Eagle Eye Networks (the intelligent-eye era)

    Verkada, founded in 2016 by three Stanford graduates and former Meraki co-founder Hans Robertson, combined cloud-managed security cameras with on-board AI analytics: object detection, person recognition, license-plate reading, and behavioral analysis running at the edge. A Verkada installation required no on-premise server; footage streamed to the cloud and was accessible from any browser. Eagle Eye Networks (founded 2012) built a similar cloud-video-surveillance platform targeted at commercial chains and multi-site enterprises. The AI analytics layer (which could automatically flag a person loitering near a restricted area, detect an unattended bag, or alert when a car's license plate matched a watchlist) began replacing the monitor-operator's attentive gaze with an algorithm that never blinked.

    Effect on the work

    AI camera analytics compressed the monitor-operator role: where a human had previously needed to watch twelve screens, an AI system could watch five hundred feeds and alert on anomalies automatically. Early adopter reports suggested reductions in control-room staffing at camera-heavy installations, though validated third-party studies are sparse.

  • Knightscope K5 + Cobalt Robotics: autonomous indoor/outdoor patrol robots

    Two companies, founded within three years of each other, brought autonomous patrol robots from research to commercial deployment. Knightscope (founded 2013, IPO January 2022) built the K5, a five-foot, outdoor patrol robot on wheels that used cameras, thermal imaging, and a microphone array to monitor parking lots, campuses, and outdoor facilities. Cobalt Robotics (founded 2016 by SpaceX and Google X alumni) built indoor patrol robots deployed in office lobbies and corporate campuses, with many sensors and a remote human operator available for video interaction. Cobalt had raised over $90 million and deployed hundreds of robots at FedEx, DoorDash, Yelp, and other Fortune 500 companies by 2022. Knightscope reported over 10,000 machines deployed by its IPO period. Neither replaced guards wholesale: both companies positioned the robots as force multipliers, with human guards responding to alerts generated by the machines.

    Effect on the work

    At installations where Knightscope K5 or Cobalt robots were deployed, clients typically reported reducing fixed-post guard hours at the specific patrol area. The robots did not eliminate guards from sites; they eliminated the routine walk-around shifts, leaving human guards for access control, escalation, and customer interaction.

  • AI gunshot detection + loitering detection + Flock Safety LPR + facial recognition (pervasive AI sensing)

    By 2020, the AI analytics layer in private security had expanded far beyond camera-monitoring into a suite of autonomous sensing capabilities. Flock Safety (founded 2017), which began as a neighborhood license-plate reader network for law enforcement, had expanded by 2025 to operate in over 5,000 communities across many states performing over 20 billion vehicle scans per month: technology that private security operations now integrated into campus perimeter protection. AI loitering detection (a person remaining stationary in a restricted zone for more than a configurable time threshold) and AI gunshot/sound-anomaly detection became standard features of commercial security platforms. Facial recognition databases, controversially, began integrating with access control at some corporate and retail installations. The cumulative effect of these capabilities is that a modern security operations center with AI tools can monitor a physical campus with the situational awareness that previously required two to three times the guard headcount, but someone still has to respond when the alarm fires.

    Effect on the work

    The AI-sensing era has not eliminated the security guard; it has changed the ratio between human response officers and electronic sensors. Large campuses that previously staffed ten patrol guards per shift now staff three or four response officers backed by an AI-monitored camera and sensor network. The remaining humans are harder to automate: they speak to distressed employees, de-escalate the person at the front desk who cannot get access to an office, and make the physical-presence decision that no camera can make.

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Security Guards employment and pay by year

On record since1850
Latest US employment1,283,470 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$38,020 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+0.9% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

In other countries

The latest figure each country's statistics agency publishes for this job. Each uses its own occupation definition, survey basis and currency, so the numbers are not directly comparable with each other or with the US figures.

  • United Kingdom (UK SOC 9231)

    Employment, 2025
    93,000, ONS ASHE 2025 Official statistic Report an errorONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Table 14): employee jobs in SOC 9231 Security guards and related occupations, United Kingdom, 2025 (ASHE "number of jobs", thousands x1000; excludes self-employment). Open Government Licence v3.0.
    Median pay, 2025
    £30,819, ONS ASHE 2025 Official statistic Report an errorONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Table 14.7a): median gross annual pay for all employee jobs in SOC 9231 Security guards and related occupations, United Kingdom, 2025. Open Government Licence v3.0.

  • Australia (ANZSCO 4422)

    Employment, 2025
    62,800, ABS Labour Force Survey Official statistic Report an errorABS Labour Force Survey (Detailed), table EQ08: employed persons in ANZSCO 4422 Security Officers and Guards, national (summed across sex and state/territory), annual average of 4 quarterly estimates.
    Median pay, 2025
    A$94,536, ABS Employee Earnings May 2025 Official statistic Report an errorAnnualised (x52) from A$1,818 median weekly earnings. ABS Survey of Employee Earnings and Hours, May 2025: median pay for full-time non-managerial employees paid at the adult rate, before tax. Surfaced via the Jobs and Skills Australia occupation profile.
View all 28 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
190035,000n/aEst., Pinkerton Researched contextReport
1940100,000n/aEst., History of Burns International Security… Researched contextReport
1970400,000n/aEst., NIJ Researched contextReport
1985750,000$11,500Est., Duke University School of Law (employment) Researched contextEst., Center for American Progress (pay) Researched contextReport
20001,104,400$17,570BLS OEWS 2000 Official statisticReport
2003964,260$19,660BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statisticReport
2004978,570$20,320BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statisticReport
2005994,220$20,760BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statisticReport
20061,004,130$21,530BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statisticReport
20071,032,260$22,570BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statisticReport
20081,046,760$23,460BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statisticReport
20091,028,830$23,820BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statisticReport
20101,006,880$23,920BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statisticReport
20111,032,940$23,900BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statisticReport
20121,046,420$23,970BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statisticReport
20131,066,730$24,070BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statisticReport
20141,077,520$24,410BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statisticReport
20151,097,660$24,630BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statisticReport
20161,103,120$25,770BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statisticReport
20171,105,440$26,900BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statisticReport
20181,114,380$28,490BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statisticReport
20191,126,370$29,680BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
20201,054,400$31,050BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
20211,057,100$31,470BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
20221,124,890$34,750BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
20231,202,940$37,070BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
20241,241,770$38,370BLS OEWS May 2024 (employment) Official statisticBLS OEWS May 2024 (pay) Official statisticReport
20251,283,470$38,020BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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