How to get government security guard contracts

Public sector demand for contract security is broader than most operators realize, and it is spread across buyer types that behave very differently in procurement.

• School districts: campus security officers, athletic and event coverage, district administration buildings, and increasingly unarmed campus monitors distinct from sworn school resource officers. Districts buy on an academic calendar and often want coverage that flexes to zero over summer. See how to sell to school districts.
• Municipalities: city hall, public works yards, water treatment plants, parking structures, libraries, community centers, and homeless services facilities. Often multiple small posts bundled into one citywide contract. See how to sell to municipalities and city government.
• Counties: courthouse screening and courtroom security, county administration, health and human services offices, county hospitals, animal shelters, and elections facilities during voting periods. Counties are among the largest single buyers of contract guard hours. See how to sell to county government.
• Transit and airport authorities: some of the highest-hour contracts in the market, typically 24/7 across many posts, with federal money in the mix and the labor standards that come with it. These are usually how to sell to special districts: water, fire, transit and parks or independent authorities.
• Housing authorities: patrol and fixed posts at developments, often with a community-relations dimension the evaluation weights heavily. See how to win public housing authority contracts.
• Hospitals and public health systems: high-hour, high-complexity work involving behavioural health holds, emergency department coverage and de-escalation training requirements. See how to sell to public hospitals and health systems.
• Universities and colleges: supplemental coverage around a sworn campus police department, residence halls, events, parking and medical centers. See how to sell to universities and colleges.
• State agencies: office buildings, motor vehicle offices, unemployment offices, labs and state facilities, frequently procured through a statewide term contract that many agencies then order against. See how to sell to state agencies.

Spend scales almost entirely with hours, not with the buyer's overall budget. A single unarmed post covered 24/7/365 requires roughly 8,760 service hours a year. At a bill rate in the mid-twenties to low-thirties per hour (the range across most of the country for standard unarmed work), that one post alone is a quarter of a million dollars a year. A mid-sized county with a courthouse screening operation, several administrative buildings and a health campus can easily run a contract in the two to six million dollar range. A large transit authority can exceed twenty million.

This is why hour count is the only sizing question that matters. Before you spend a day on a bid, add up the posts and the hours in the schedule and multiply. That tells you whether the contract is worth your time far faster than the agency's budget documents will.

Guard services are procured as ongoing operating services, which means the contract structure looks nothing like a construction award. The dominant pattern:

Two consequences follow from that structure, and both should shape how you bid.

First, the option years are where your money is. Year one carries your recruiting, uniforming, licensing, background screening and transition costs. If you win a five-year contract and perform, years two through five are where the account becomes profitable. This is why buying a contract at an unsustainable rate is such a common and such a fatal mistake. You cannot make it back later, because the escalation clause is fixed at award.

Second, escalation is a real risk you are being asked to price. If the contract escalates at two percent a year and your market's guard wages rise at five, you will be losing money on the post by year three and cutting corners on supervision to survive. Read the escalation clause before you price the base year, and if it is fixed and thin, price the base year to survive the full term rather than to win it.

For a broader view of how public solicitations are structured and what the different vehicle types mean, see RFP vs RFQ vs IFB vs ITB.

Contract security is a labor pass-through business. Somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of your bill rate is the officer's wage and the statutory burden on it. Everything you have (supervision, recruiting, uniforms, scheduling technology, insurance, profit) comes out of the remainder. Public evaluators know this, and many solicitations require you to submit the build-up rather than a single number.

Build it in this order, every time:

The arithmetic above is a worked structure, not a market quote. Your own SUTA rate, experience modifier and health contribution will move it materially. But the shape is the point. Note what it shows: on a thirty dollar bill rate, roughly a dollar is profit. That is normal for this trade, and it is why the two things that destroy guard contractors are unbilled overtime and turnover.

Unbilled overtime happens when an officer calls out, nobody is available on straight time, and you cover the post at time-and-a-half while billing the contract rate. Two or three of those a week on a single account will consume the entire profit line. Turnover does the same thing more slowly: every replacement officer costs you recruiting, screening, licensing and training hours before they generate a single billable hour.

Price the account with a realistic relief factor built in. If you assume every officer works every scheduled shift, you have not priced the business you are actually going to run.

Every operator entering this market needs to understand that two separate licenses are in play, and public solicitations check both.

The company license authorizes your firm to provide contract security services in that state. It is held by the business, usually requires a qualifying individual or manager with documented experience, and typically carries insurance and sometimes bonding requirements. In California this is the Private Patrol Operator license. In Florida it is the Class B security agency license, with a Class MB agency manager. In Texas it is a security services contractor license issued by the Department of Public Safety Private Security Bureau. Without it, you cannot legally hold the contract at all, and a bid from an unlicensed firm is non-responsive on its face.

The officer registration authorizes the individual to work as a security officer. It is held by the person, is generally portable between employers within the state, and requires training hours, a criminal history check and fingerprinting.

Two practical consequences. First, if you are expanding into a neighboring state, the company license is the long pole. Allow months, not weeks, and do not bid work you cannot legally staff on day one. Second, because officer registrations are portable, the officers currently working the site you are bidding are already licensed. That is a substantial part of why incumbent capture works.

There is no national security officer license. Each state runs its own regime, and the training hours differ enough that a staffing plan written for one state is wrong in another. Verified requirements in several of the largest markets:

Verify the current hour counts against the state board itself before you build a staffing plan or price a training line. Several states have amended their requirements in recent years, including moves to permit live online instruction for portions of the classroom hours.

The bidding implication is direct. Where the state requires substantial pre-assignment training, as New York and Florida do, you cannot hire an unlicensed candidate on Monday and post them on Tuesday. Your mobilization schedule has to account for it, and evaluators in those states know exactly how long it takes. A transition plan that promises full staffing in ten days in a 40-hour-training state tells the evaluator you either do not know the rules or intend to break them.

Armed posts change your cost structure in four ways at once: a higher base wage, a separate and more expensive state permit with annual requalification, a materially higher workers compensation and general liability cost, and a smaller hiring pool. Expect an armed post to bill several dollars an hour above the equivalent unarmed post, sometimes considerably more.

They also change your risk. A single use-of-force incident on a public contract generates litigation, press coverage, a council or board hearing, and often a termination for convenience. This is the one part of the guard business where a bad night ends a company.

Which is why a very common public specification is unarmed officers with an armed supervisor, or unarmed officers with a defined law enforcement escalation protocol. The buyer gets an armed response capability without arming every post, and the price stays manageable. When you see that structure in a solicitation, do not try to talk the buyer out of it. It is usually a deliberate policy decision made above the procurement officer's head, frequently by a governing board after public comment.

Read the post orders carefully to see which posts are armed, and confirm whether the requirement is for a licensed armed officer or for an off-duty sworn officer. Those are different labor markets at very different prices, and bidders confuse them regularly.

A large share of public guard work carries a mandated wage floor, and understanding which regime applies is a pricing prerequisite, not a compliance afterthought.

• Service Contract Act wage determinations apply where federal money flows into the service contract. The determination lists a minimum hourly rate for the guard classification in that locality plus a health and welfare fringe amount, and both are mandatory. Determinations are published and searchable on SAM.gov, and the applicable one is normally attached as an exhibit to the solicitation.
• State and local living-wage and prevailing-wage ordinances for service contracts are common in larger cities and counties. These are separate from construction prevailing wage and often set a higher floor than the federal minimum, sometimes with a differential depending on whether the employer provides health coverage.
• Contract-specific wage floors appear in solicitations that simply state a minimum officer wage the agency expects to be paid, whether or not any ordinance requires it. Boards do this deliberately to prevent a race to the bottom on officer pay.

For the mechanics of how these wage regimes work and what your certified payroll obligations look like, see Prevailing wage and Davis-Bacon for contractors.

Here is the strategic point most bidders miss. When the solicitation sets the wage, it has effectively set most of your price. Every serious bidder is paying the same base rate. The differences that remain are your burden rate, your overhead and your profit, and those cannot vary by much before you are either non-credible or non-viable. In practice the responsive bids on a wage-floor contract cluster within a few percent of each other.

That means price is no longer the lever. If everyone is within three percent on cost, the evaluation is decided by the technical score, and the technical score in guard services is about turnover, supervision and transition. Spend your bid effort there, and resist the temptation to shave the wage burden to buy a price advantage that will not move the award and will get your cost realism questioned.

Post orders are the written instructions governing what an officer does at a specific location: the hours the post is staffed, the duties, the patrol routes and frequencies, reporting requirements, escalation protocols, access control procedures, and what to do in defined emergencies. Every serious guard solicitation includes either the current post orders or a detailed statement of the posts and hours to be covered.

Treat this as the single most important document in the package, because it is where your cost is actually determined. Read it and extract, for every post:

• Days and hours covered, and whether the post is 24/7, extended-day or event-driven
• Whether the post is armed or unarmed
• Any special qualification: de-escalation training, screening equipment operation, CPR and AED certification, driving a marked vehicle, bilingual requirement
• Whether the post can be left unattended for breaks or requires a relief officer
• Holiday coverage, and whether holidays bill at a premium rate
• Supervisory coverage expected and whether the supervisor is billable

Then price posts, not people. A 24/7 post is roughly 168 hours a week. At 40 hours per officer that is 4.2 officers of straight time, and in the real world you need more than that, because officers take holidays, get sick, attend mandatory training and quit. The multiplier you apply for that is your relief factor, and getting it wrong is the most common way a guard contract goes underwater in month four.

Two specific traps. First, unattended-post requirements: if the post orders say the post may never be left vacant, breaks require relief coverage and your effective hours per post go up meaningfully. Second, event and surge coverage: many district and municipal contracts include an as-needed hourly rate for events. Price that rate to be genuinely profitable. It is real volume, it is often short-notice overtime, and buyers frequently use far more of it than the estimate in the solicitation suggests.

Security services are usually procured as a best-value RFP rather than a low-bid invitation for bids, because agencies have learned that awarding guard work to the lowest number produces exactly the service the lowest number buys. That said, you will still meet straight low-bid solicitations, particularly from smaller municipalities and for single-post work.

On a typical best-value guard RFP, the weighting looks something like this:

Three things separate high-scoring guard proposals from the rest.

State your actual turnover rate as a number. Nearly every bidder writes a paragraph about how they value their officers. Almost none publish a figure. If your annualised turnover on comparable accounts is 34 percent and the industry runs far higher, say 34 percent and say how you measured it. Evaluators have no way to distinguish good firms from bad ones on adjectives, and a specific number that you are willing to be held to is the most credible thing in the document.

how to build an RFP compliance matrix explains how to structure your response so an evaluator can score each requirement without hunting, which matters more in this trade than most because the technical sections are heavily prescriptive.

Show the supervision ratio and who pays for it. A named account manager and a defined field supervisor rotation with a stated visit frequency scores. Vague assurances of management oversight do not.

Make the transition plan a calendar. Day one through day thirty, with licensing verification, uniform issue, site-specific training against the post orders, and the incumbent retention offer laid out explicitly.

Public guard contracts layer their own screening requirements on top of the state licensing regime, and these are pass or fail.

• Criminal background checks beyond the state license: commonly a national and county-level search, sometimes with a specified lookback period and a defined list of disqualifying offences.
• Fingerprinting against state and FBI databases, which is already part of most state licensing regimes but is frequently re-required by the agency.
• Additional screening for school and youth-serving sites: districts almost always require their own separate clearance and sex offender registry checks for anyone on a campus, independent of the guard license. Build the processing time into your mobilization schedule.
• Drug testing: pre-employment as standard, with random and post-incident testing frequently specified.
• Motor vehicle records where officers operate a patrol vehicle.

On insurance, the pattern in guard RFPs is well established: commercial general liability in the one to five million per occurrence range with a higher aggregate, automobile liability, workers compensation at statutory limits with employers liability, and often an umbrella. Two coverages deserve specific attention.

First, the general liability policy must not exclude the work you are doing. Standard commercial general liability forms in this trade frequently carry assault and battery exclusions, firearms exclusions, or exclusions for professional services. An agency requiring five million in coverage will not accept a policy that excludes the exact events they are worried about, and a certificate that reveals such an exclusion at award can cost you the contract.

Second, professional liability, sometimes written as security professional liability or errors and omissions, covers failure to perform the security service itself: the claim that your officer did not patrol, did not respond, or did not detect. That is a different exposure from bodily injury, and larger public buyers increasingly require it explicitly.

Get your broker to review the insurance exhibit before you bid, not after you win. Coverage you cannot actually obtain at the specified limits is a withdrawn bid and, in some jurisdictions, a forfeited bid security. On when bonding enters the picture for service contracts, see bid bonds and performance bonds explained.

In most trades, taking over a contract means bringing in your own crew. In contract security, the opposite is standard: the winning bidder typically retains a large share of the officers already working the site, often 60 to 80 percent of them.

There are good reasons for this, and you should lean into all of them rather than treating it as an awkward compromise.

• Those officers are already licensed in the state, already badged and cleared by the agency, and already know the post orders, the building, the staff and the routine.
• Retaining them collapses your mobilization risk. The alternative is recruiting and licensing an entire roster to a fixed start date.
• The agency's own staff have relationships with those officers and do not want to meet a completely new set of faces on day one.
• Some jurisdictions have displaced worker or worker retention ordinances that legally require a successor service contractor to offer employment to the predecessor's employees for a transition period. Where such an ordinance applies, this is not optional.

Because it is standard, evaluators score it. A strong transition plan says explicitly that you will offer positions to qualified incumbent officers, states the wage you will offer relative to what they currently earn, and explains your screening process for deciding who to retain. A plan that is silent on incumbent officers reads as either naive or as a signal that you intend to churn the site.

One caution: retaining officers does not mean retaining the incumbent's problems. If the agency is re-bidding because service was poor, the failure is usually supervision and management, not the officers on post. Say that. Explain what you will change at the supervisory layer while keeping continuity at the officer layer. That is a genuinely persuasive argument and very few bidders make it well.

Guard work is an operating expense funded from the general fund, so it tracks the buyer's fiscal year rather than a construction season.

• Most municipalities, counties and school districts run a July 1 to June 30 fiscal year. That drives solicitations onto the street between roughly January and April for a July 1 start, allowing time for evaluation, board approval and a 30 to 60 day transition.
• Many states and some large agencies use different year ends. Several states run October 1 to September 30 or a calendar year. Confirm the specific buyer rather than assuming.
• Board or council approval is a scheduled meeting, not a date the procurement officer controls. A contract of any size requires an agenda item, which means the award timeline is shaped by when the board meets. Slippage of a month is routine and you should plan mobilization cash accordingly.
• School district work has a second seasonal layer. Districts often want reduced or zero coverage over summer, which means the annualised value is lower than a straight hours calculation suggests, and it creates a real staffing problem: officers you lay off in June do not come back in August.

The practical implication is that your pipeline work happens in the autumn. Registering on the buyer's procurement portal, meeting the facilities and security directors, requesting the current contract and its pricing through a public records request, and getting on the bidders list all need to happen months before the solicitation posts. Reading an RFP for the first time on the day it is issued means you are already behind whoever has been tracking that account for a year.

Across public guard procurement, the same three failures account for most eliminated bids, and none of them are about the quality of the security service you would provide.

1. The company license or insurance is not in place at bid submission. This is the single most common disqualification for firms expanding into a new state or a new buyer type. The solicitation requires a current state agency license number and evidence of the specified coverage, and a bid submitted while the license application is pending is non-responsive. There is no cure period for this in most jurisdictions. If you cannot legally perform on the start date, do not bid. Bid the next cycle and use the intervening months to get licensed.

2. The pricing form was not completed exactly as required. Guard solicitations use rigid pricing schedules: a rate per post category, per year, sometimes with separate straight-time, overtime and holiday rates, and a mandatory total that must reconcile to the estimated hours. Bidders substitute their own spreadsheet, omit an option year, price a category they think is unnecessary as zero or not applicable, or submit a rate build-up that does not add up to the rate they quoted. Any of those makes the bid mathematically non-responsive, and the agency generally cannot let you fix it after opening. See how to respond to an RFP for how to run a submission review that catches this class of error.

3. Failure to attend a mandatory pre-bid meeting or site walk. Guard RFPs frequently make the walkthrough mandatory, because the buyer wants bidders to have physically seen the posts. If the solicitation says mandatory and your name is not on the sign-in sheet, your bid is rejected unopened regardless of its merits. Diary the date the moment you download the package, send someone who can actually assess the posts, and sign in personally rather than assuming a colleague did.

Beyond those three, the recurring soft failure is a proposal that answers a generic question rather than the one asked. Guard RFPs ask site-specific questions: how you would handle a particular building, a particular population, a particular incident type. Boilerplate that never mentions the site scores poorly even when it is technically compliant. When you lose, request a debrief and find out which of these it was; see how to request a debrief after losing a bid.

If you are a security firm with commercial accounts moving into public work, here is an honest picture of year one.

Months one to three. Confirm your company license status in every state you intend to bid. Register on the procurement portals of every agency within your service radius. This is unglamorous administrative work and it is the gate to everything else. File public records requests for the current guard contracts at your top ten target agencies, which will give you the incumbent, the rate structure, the post schedule and the expiry date. That last item is the single most valuable piece of intelligence in this market.

Months four to eight. Build the reusable proposal core: company history, licenses, insurance certificates, financials, sample post orders, training curriculum, quality assurance plan, supervisor job descriptions, and your turnover methodology. Roughly 60 percent of a guard proposal is reusable across bids, and having it built means you can respond to a 21-day solicitation without abandoning your operations. Meet facilities and security directors at your targets before anything is out for bid. Attend the pre-bid meetings for contracts you do not intend to bid, to see who shows up and what the buyer emphasizes.

Months nine to twelve. Bid selectively: four to eight well-chosen solicitations rather than twenty scattergun ones. Prioritize contracts where you can staff from your existing labor pool, where the wage floor is one you can meet without pain, and where the incumbent has been in place long enough for the agency to be curious about alternatives. Expect to win one, possibly two. how much does it cost to bid on a government contract? covers how to think about the real cost of each pursuit so you can decline the wrong ones without regret.

Realistic expectations for a firm doing this well: a handful of small-to-mid awards in year one, meaningful revenue from year two as those accounts annualise and option years are exercised, and a step change in year three when you have public references of comparable size and can credibly bid the larger county and transit work that was out of reach at the start. The references are the asset. The first public contract is worth far more than its own margin because it is what qualifies you for the next five.

One financial reality to plan for: you will pay officers weekly or biweekly from day one, and the agency will pay you monthly in arrears, often 30 days after invoice. On a two million dollar account that is a substantial working capital requirement in the first quarter of performance. Arrange the line of credit before you win, not after.

The shortest path into this market is not a better proposal template. It is knowing which contracts expire when, and being in front of those buyers before the solicitation is written.

Concretely, in order:

1. Confirm your company license covers every state in your target radius, and start any new application now. It is the longest lead item you have.
2. Pull the current guard contracts at your top targets through public records requests. Note the incumbent, the rates, the post schedule, the term and the expiry.
3. Register on every relevant procurement portal, and set the notification categories correctly so guard solicitations actually reach you.
4. Build the reusable proposal core once, properly.
5. Measure and document your real turnover rate, because it is the number that will win or lose you technical points.

If you would rather not build the tracking layer yourself (the expiry dates, the portal monitoring, the solicitation triage), that is the part we handle for contractors in this trade. Book a call and we will walk through the guard contracts coming up for re-bid in your service area and which of them you are actually positioned to win.