UC Berkeley Labor Center report profiles the security officer workforce in the U.S. and shows why improving job quality is a matter of both economic justice and public safety.

A recent report from the UC Berkeley Labor Center analyzes job quality, labor market dynamics, and workforce conditions among security officers in the United States. This publication combines national data with state and metropolitan factsheets to profile the security officer workforce and to show why improving job quality is a matter of both economic justice and public safety.

Check out report  coverage in KQED – “The Challenges and Dangers Security Guards Face”

Key issues and toplines in the report:

• Wages remain low, and a vast majority of security officers earn less than a living wage. The median security officer earns $18.70 an hour—about 73 cents for every dollar earned by the typical U.S. worker—and $36,282 a year. Seventy-one percent of security officers earn less than the MIT living wage for a single adult, and 41 percent are low-wage by the standard two-thirds-of-median benchmark.
• Benefits are inadequate, with 43% of security officers lacking health insurance through an employer or union.
• Higher turnover continues to plague the security industry. Annual turnover in the security industry reached 89 percent in 2024—far above the 66 percent private-sector average—and has exceeded it every year for a decade, peaking near 99 percent in 2022.
• Training remains inconsistent. Without a federal standard, states are left to fill the void with mixed results. Only about half of the states set a minimum number of training hours for unarmed security officers, ranging from 4 to 48, and few require the de-escalation and crisis-response training the job increasingly demands.
• Security work is dangerous. Security officers die on the job at more than twice the rate of the average worker, and nearly two-thirds of their fatal injuries result from assaults and other violent acts. These workers often face challenging interactions with vulnerable populations and volatile situations alone, at night, and without backup.
• Through policy decisions, some cities and states are stepping up to help security officers. New York City, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.—have adopted sectoral wage-and-benefit standards for security officers, and California is advancing legislation to raise training standards.

Photo credit: Annette Bernhardt