Security Officer Pay: Why Changing Contractor Does Not Change What Your Officers Earn

Why security officer pay is almost the whole price

Most services you buy contain materials, equipment, software, premises and margin. Manned guarding contains a person standing somewhere for a number of hours. Strip out insurance, licensing, uniform, supervision, vetting and the contractor's margin, and what remains — the overwhelming majority of the charge rate — is security officer pay.

That has a consequence buyers rarely follow through. When two guarding quotations differ by a meaningful amount for the same hours at the same site, the difference is not usually efficiency. There is very little to be efficient about. The difference is what the officer is paid, or what the contractor has decided not to spend on supervision, screening and cover.

This guide sets out what the current security officer pay floors are, why a change of contractor does not move them, and what the questions are that reveal a rate before you sign rather than after.

The real Living Wage, and what it is not

Two different numbers get called the living wage, and conflating them is the most common error made when setting security officer pay in a tender.

The National Living Wage is the legal floor

The National Living Wage is statutory. From 1 April 2026 it is £12.71 an hour for workers aged 21 and over, with lower bands for younger workers and apprentices. It is set by government, it is compulsory, and paying below it is an offence.

The real Living Wage is voluntary and independently calculated

The real Living Wage is a voluntary rate calculated by the Living Wage Foundation using the Minimum Income Standard — what it actually costs to cover rent, food, utilities, transport and childcare. It is £13.45 an hour outside London and £14.80 in London. It is recalculated each autumn and accredited employers implement the new rate within six months.

The gap between the two is 74p an hour. The Living Wage Foundation puts the annual difference for a full-time worker at about £1,443. Across the economy, roughly 4.4 million jobs — about one in seven — still pay below the real Living Wage.

The national picture

One in seven UK jobs still pays below the real Living Wage

Why changing contractor does not reset security officer pay

Here is the part that surprises buyers, and it is the reason security officer pay deserves proper attention at the first award rather than the third.

When a client moves a guarding contract from one supplier to another, that is almost always a service provision change under the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006. Regulation 3(1)(b) defines it, and limb (ii) is the retender scenario exactly:

“activities cease to be carried out by a contractor on a client's behalf (whether or not those activities had previously been carried out by the client on his own behalf) and are carried out instead by another person (‘a subsequent contractor’) on the client's behalf”

Regulation 3(1)(b)(ii), TUPE 2006

Regulation 3(3) attaches the conditions: immediately before the change there must be an organised grouping of employees in Great Britain whose principal purpose is carrying out those activities for that client, and the client must intend the activities to continue other than in connection with a single short-term event or task.

A guarding team assigned to one site, working for one client, is a textbook organised grouping. Which means the officers — and the security officer pay rates attached to them — do not leave when the contractor does.

What TUPE actually transfers

Regulation 4(1) is the operative provision, and it is worth reading slowly:

“a relevant transfer shall not operate so as to terminate the contract of employment of any person employed by the transferor and assigned to the organised grouping of resources or employees that is subject to the relevant transfer, which would otherwise be terminated by the transfer, but any such contract shall have effect after the transfer as if originally made between the person so employed and the transferee.”

Regulation 4(1), TUPE 2006

The contract continues as if originally made with the new contractor. Not renegotiated. Not restarted. Continued. Regulation 4(2) adds that all the outgoing contractor's rights, powers, duties and liabilities under that contract transfer with it, and that acts and omissions before the transfer are treated as the incoming contractor's own.

So the practical position is this. If a contract is awarded at a rate that only supports the statutory minimum, those officers are employed on that rate. Retender in three years and they transfer on it. The saving locked in at the first award becomes the wage structure of every supplier who follows, until a client decides to fund a change.

The turnover cost that never appears on the invoice

The counter-argument to lifting security officer pay is straightforward: it costs more. That is true and should be said plainly. A contractor paying above the real Living Wage cannot be the cheapest bid, and any that claims to be both is telling you something about one of the two.

What the cheapest bid does not show is the cost of the churn it produces. Those costs are real, they are borne partly by the client, and none of them are itemised.

What low security officer pay does to the site

Security officer pay is usually discussed as an employment issue. On a live site it is an operational one, and low security officer pay shows up in ways that have nothing to do with payroll.

Familiarity is the detection mechanism

An officer who has worked a site for two years notices what is different. A vehicle parked where vehicles are not normally parked. A subcontractor whose van is not on the expected list. A gate that closes but does not latch. None of that appears in assignment instructions, because it cannot be written in advance. It is pattern recognition, and it takes time on one site to build.

An officer in their second week does not have it. They will follow the instructions correctly and miss the thing the instructions do not cover. That is not a failing of the individual — it is an inevitable consequence of a post that changes hands repeatedly.

Presence and attendance are not the same

This distinction matters when comparing a staffed post with a patrol round. As set out in our guide to mobile patrol and static guarding, four visits across a twelve-hour night leaves a site unobserved for roughly 165 minutes in every 180. A site that churns through officers is buying something similar without realising it: a body on the post, but not the accumulated attention that makes the post work.

Lone working raises the stakes

Many guarding posts are lone-worker positions, often at night. The HSE is explicit that employers must manage the health and safety risks before people work alone, and that lone workers face greater risks without direct supervision or anyone to help if something goes wrong. A supplier under pressure on rate is a supplier under pressure on supervision, welfare checks and relief — exactly the things that make lone working safe.

Why public buyers can no longer default to lowest price

For public-sector and regulated buyers, the framework has shifted. The Procurement Act 2023 changed the award test. Section 19(1) provides that a contracting authority may award a public contract to the supplier submitting the most advantageous tender — not, as under the previous regime, the most economically advantageous tender.

Section 19(2) defines that tender as the one which satisfies the authority's requirements and best satisfies the award criteria, assessed against the published assessment methodology and the relative importance of the criteria. The drafting deliberately removes the gravitational pull of price.

Private-sector buyers are under no equivalent duty, but the logic transfers. If your evaluation model weights price at seventy per cent on a labour-only service, you have written a specification for the lowest wage the market will bear, whatever the quality questions say.

What an SIA licence proves about security officer pay

An SIA licence is frequently offered as reassurance about quality, and sometimes as an implied answer to a question about security officer pay. It is worth being precise about what it covers.

A licence is granted to an individual. It confirms identity, an approved qualification and that criminality checks have been completed. It is a legal minimum for the person, and there were more than 446,000 licence holders in the UK at the last published count. It says nothing whatever about the company deploying that person, the supervision behind them, or the rate they are paid.

Company-level assurance sits elsewhere: the SIA's Approved Contractor Scheme, and the British Standards the SIA says following is a condition of approval — BS 7499 for static guarding, BS 7984-3 for mobile services, BS 7858 for screening. Against 446,000 individual licences, ACS approval is held by a very small number of companies by comparison. The gap between those two figures is the whole point.

Questions that expose a security officer pay rate

You will not usually be told the security officer pay rate directly, and a contractor is not obliged to open their cost model. But a rate is difficult to hide from these questions.

None of these questions are unreasonable, and none of them require a supplier to disclose their margin. A contractor who has thought about their workforce will answer them without difficulty. A contractor who has bid the lowest number that clears the floor will not enjoy them.

What AGS pays, and why we publish it

AGS Security pays above the real Living Wage to every directly employed officer. We put that in writing because a claim that cannot be checked is not worth making, and because it is the single term in our pricing that a client cannot see and has to take on trust.

We are not an accredited Living Wage Employer, and we do not describe ourselves as one. Accreditation is a formal status with its own requirements, including coverage of third-party contracted staff. We are describing what we pay, not a badge we hold.

Because our security officer pay sits above the floor, we are also not the cheapest quotation you will receive, and we do not attempt to be. What we offer instead is a rate that holds through the contract, a roster that does not collapse in month three, and officers who are still on your site in month twelve with everything they learned in month one.

Security officer pay: frequently asked questions