Security Guard Salary by State in 2026: BLS Wage Data & Rankings

Security guards in the United States earn a mean annual wage of $42,470 based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data covering 1.28 million workers. That national number masks a $29,400 gap between the highest-paying state and the lowest. Safe and Sound Security compiled BLS wage data for all 50 states and adjusted each for cost of living to show where guard pay goes furthest.

Key Takeaways

• California ranks 15th in nominal security guard pay but drops to 41st after adjusting for cost of living. Iowa climbs 18 spots (27th to 9th) and South Dakota jumps 20 (35th to 15th). States with lower living costs consistently outperform high-cost states in real purchasing power.
• Security guard salaries range from $31,320 in West Virginia to $60,720 in D.C. That $29,400 gap spans a 1.94x pay multiple across all 50 states and the District of Columbia, based on BLS data for May 2025.
• The U.S. employs nearly twice as many security guards as police officers, but guards earn roughly half the pay. Mean annual wage: $42,470 for guards vs. $79,200 for police, according to BLS.
• Oil and gas extraction pays security guards $71,970 per year, 74% more than contract security firms where 73.7% of all guards work at a mean of $41,380.
• Armed guards earn roughly 23% more than unarmed guards ($47,552 vs. $38,698 per year), but the BLS does not publish separate wage data for the two categories.
• BLS projects 0% employment growth through 2034, yet 162,300 positions open every year because the industry’s 77% annual turnover rate drives constant replacement hiring.
• No federal agency maintains a census of private security officers. A planned National Private Security Survey was designed in 2009 but never fielded.

Security Guard Salary by State: All 50 States Ranked

The national mean annual wage for security guards is $42,470 and the national median is $38,020, according to the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program for May 2025.

BLS publishes mean wages (not median) at the state level. Every figure below comes from the May 2025 OEWS survey covering SOC code 33-9032 (Security Guards).

California and Texas employ the most security guards (199,480 and 106,210), but neither ranks in the top 10 for pay. California sits at 15th and Texas at 41st. New York (134,700 guards) does crack the top 10 at 7th.

The five states with the largest guard workforces, California, New York, Texas, Florida, and Illinois, together employ 589,590 guards, or 45.9% of the national total.

Highest-Paying States

D.C. leads at $60,720, roughly $6,600 above second-place Alaska ($54,140). Both have relatively small guard workforces. Among states with 10,000+ guards, the highest payers are Virginia ($47,070), New York ($46,450), and Illinois ($44,240).

Lowest-Paying States

West Virginia ($31,320), Mississippi ($31,750), and Alabama ($34,680) sit at the bottom. All three are also among the states with the lowest minimum wages (at or near the federal $7.25/hour floor). Even at the bottom, security guards earn roughly twice the federal poverty guideline for a single individual (approximately $15,000 to $16,000 annually, per Census Bureau thresholds).

Security Guard Salary Adjusted for Cost of Living

Safe and Sound Security’s cost-of-living adjusted rankings show that nominal pay is misleading. A $44,920 salary in California buys less than a $42,220 salary in Iowa once local prices are factored in.

We adjusted each state’s mean wage using the Bureau of Economic Analysis Regional Price Parities (RPPs), which measure price differences across states as a percentage of the national average. The formula: Adjusted Wage = Nominal Wage x 100 / RPP.

Biggest Drops After Cost-of-Living Adjustment

Biggest Climbs After Cost-of-Living Adjustment

Safe and Sound Security’s analysis found that the nominal $29,400 pay gap between D.C. and West Virginia narrows to $18,718 after adjustment, compressing the multiple from 1.94x to 1.53x. The gap persists, but cost of living absorbs roughly a third of it.

Security Guard Salary by Industry

Where a security guard works matters as much as the state they work in. The same guard role pays $30,590 more per year in oil and gas extraction than in a typical contract security firm.

Source: BLS OEWS, May 2025 data

The dominant employer category, Investigation and Security Services (NAICS 5616), accounts for 73.7% of all security guard employment, according to BLS data for May 2023. These are contract security firms that staff guards at client sites. They also pay near the bottom: $41,380 mean annual.

Guards employed directly by hospitals, schools, and banks earn $5,000 to $17,000 more per year than those working through staffing firms. The highest premiums go to guards protecting energy infrastructure, financial assets, and data centers.

Armed vs. Unarmed Security Guard Salary

Armed security guards earn roughly 23% more than unarmed guards nationally, a premium of about $8,854 per year.

Source: Salary.com Armed Security Guard, Salary.com Unarmed Security Guard (employer-reported data, effective June 2026)

The BLS does not publish separate wage data for armed and unarmed guards. Both fall under a single occupation code (SOC 33-9032), which is one of the gaps this report addresses.

State Licensing Affects the Premium

Licensing requirements vary widely. Thirty-eight states and D.C. require state-level security guard licensing. Twelve states (including Colorado, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Mississippi, and Pennsylvania) do not require state licensing at all.

Training hours for unarmed guards range from zero (no requirement) to 48 hours (Alaska). Armed guard endorsements range from 4 hours (South Carolina) to 47 hours (New York). States with higher training requirements tend to have higher pay, though the relationship is not linear.

D.C. and New York City have enacted security-specific minimum wages above the general minimum. NYC’s Law 2026/061, passed in January 2026, sets guard-specific pay floors starting January 2027.

Security Guard Pay vs. Police Officer Salary

The United States employs 1,283,470 security guards and 670,520 police and sheriff’s patrol officers, according to BLS data for May 2025. Guards outnumber police by a ratio of 1.9 to 1.

Despite the larger workforce, guards earn roughly half what police officers make.

Source: BLS OEWS, May 2025 data

A police officer at the 10th percentile ($47,640 per year) earns more than the median security guard ($38,020). The gap has held steady for years: police wages have historically been 1.8x to 2x security guard wages.

According to Duke University School of Law, the U.S. now employs roughly twice as many security guards as it did two decades ago, while the population grew only 16%.

Career Ladder for Security Guards

Source: BLS OEWS, May 2025 data

Security Guard Wage Percentiles

Not all security guards earn the same. The 90th-percentile guard earns $58,840 per year, nearly double the 10th percentile ($30,210).

Source: BLS OEWS, May 2025 data

The median ($38,020) sits below the mean ($42,470), meaning the distribution skews right: a smaller number of high-earning guards pull the average above the midpoint.

For context, the median security guard wage ($38,020) is 23% below the median for all U.S. occupations ($49,500) and 25% below the median for all protective service occupations ($50,580), according to the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook.

Wage Growth Over Time

Security guard wages have grown faster than inflation over the past six years.

Source: BLS OEWS (May survey, annual releases). 2024 is excluded because BLS did not publish a standalone May 2024 OEWS release; national figures for that year are available only via the Occupational Outlook Handbook.

Mean annual wages rose 28.6% from $33,030 (2019) to $42,470 (2025). Employment dropped 6.4% in 2020 due to COVID-related shutdowns, then recovered and surpassed pre-pandemic levels by 2022. Total employment grew 13.9% from 2019 to 2025.

Security Guard Employment and Job Outlook

The BLS projects 0% employment growth for security guards from 2024 to 2034, well below the 3% average for all occupations, according to the Occupational Outlook Handbook. The BLS attributes the flat outlook partly to advances in remote monitoring technology, including commercial security cameras integrated with artificial intelligence.

Yet 162,300 positions open every year. Nearly all of those openings come from workers leaving the occupation, not from new positions being created. Industry turnover runs at 77% annually, up from 69.3% in 2019 and well above the 58.1% private-sector average.

The BLS Occupational Requirements Survey reports that 87.4% of security guard positions require a high school diploma, and more than 99.5% require on-the-job training. Fewer than 0.5% of guard positions allow telework.

No Federal Census of Private Security

No federal agency maintains a census or regular survey of the private security workforce. The Bureau of Justice Statistics commissioned a feasibility study in 2009 (conducted by RTI International) that designed a National Private Security Survey. According to the RTI International feasibility report, the award closed without the survey ever being fielded.

The Census of State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies (CSLLEA) tracks police officer counts, but no equivalent exists for the 1.28 million private security guards. That gap is part of why this report centralizes BLS wage data into a single reference: without a dedicated survey, the OEWS program is the closest thing to a national accounting of what security guards earn.

Methodology

This report draws on three primary data sources:

State and national wages: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025 survey period, SOC code 33-9032 (Security Guards). State-level mean wages and employment counts for all 50 states and D.C. were retrieved via the BLS Public API v2. BLS publishes mean wages at the state level; state-level medians are not available.

Cost-of-living adjustment: Bureau of Economic Analysis Regional Price Parities (RPPs), 2022 data year, retrieved from the BEA Survey of Current Business. RPPs measure price differences across states as a percentage of the national average (100 = national average), covering goods, housing rents, utilities, and other services. The 2022 RPPs are the most recent complete verified set available in bulk. RPPs shift slowly, typically less than 2 points per state per year. The complete 2024 state-level table was published but could not be extracted in bulk from BEA’s interactive application.

Armed/unarmed differential: Salary.com employer-reported wage data, effective June 2026. These figures reflect employer survey data and use different methodology than BLS. They are not directly comparable to OEWS figures and are presented separately.

Every BLS wage figure in this report was verified against the original BLS source on June 12, 2026.

What was not combined: BLS OEWS and Salary.com data use different methodologies. They are presented in separate tables and never blended. Historical OEWS data (2019-2025) comes from a consistent methodology and is presented as a single time series. Industry concentration data from the BLS Monthly Labor Review (2012, referencing May 2009 data) is compared to May 2023 OEWS as a directional trend only, not a precise computed change, because of minor NAICS coding differences between the two periods.

Known limitations: BLS OEWS excludes self-employed workers. SOC 33-9032 combines armed and unarmed security guards into a single code. The industry turnover rate (77%) is an aggregate figure; individual firm turnover ranges from 30% to over 300%.

FAQs

The Bottom Line

Security guard salaries vary by nearly $30,000 across states, and nominal pay rankings change significantly once cost of living is factored in. The states that look best on paper are not always the ones where guard pay stretches furthest. For facilities managers weighing guard staffing costs, the state-level data in this report provides a clearer picture than national averages.

Safe and Sound Security has been designing and installing commercial security systems for 19+ years across 20,000+ locations. We regularly help organizations evaluate how permanent security infrastructure (cameras, access control, alarms) compares to ongoing guard staffing costs. For a site assessment, contact us.

This report will be updated when the BLS publishes May 2026 wage data (expected spring 2027) and when BEA releases updated Regional Price Parities.

Sources

1. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics Tables
2. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Security Guards Occupation Profile
3. Bureau of Labor Statistics: National Employment and Wage Data, Table 1
4. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Security Guards and Gambling Surveillance Officers, Occupational Outlook Handbook
5. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Police and Detectives, Occupational Outlook Handbook
6. Bureau of Labor Statistics: Security Guards, Occupational Requirements Survey
7. Bureau of Economic Analysis: Regional Price Parities by State and Metro Area
8. Bureau of Economic Analysis: Regional Price Parities, Survey of Current Business
9. Salary.com: Armed Security Guard Salary
10. Salary.com: Unarmed Security Guard Salary
11. Duke University School of Law: Private Security, Public Protection
12. Bureau of Justice Statistics: Private Security Industry Review (RTI International)
13. Congressional Research Service: Poverty in the United States