Moving from 24/7 on-site guarding to remote monitoring: what it costs and what you give up

Keeping one security post staffed around the clock costs about €173,000 a year in France, €256,000 in Belgium and €141,000 in Spain in labour alone. These are wage floors plus employer charges, before any contractor margin, computed from pay rates in force in 2026 and read on 18 October 2026. Remote monitoring can take over most of the watching. The first person to reach an incident still has to be on site or on the way, so the choice is how much presence you keep and how fast it must arrive.

What one 24/7 post costs in labour

A year has 8,760 hours. A full-time guard is paid for the normal working week times 52.14 weeks. Paid leave and public holidays come out of that, and what remains is the time one person actually stands at the post. Divide 8,760 by it and you get the cover factor: the number of full-time people one post needs to stay staffed every hour of the year.

Each guard’s cost adds the non-wage share of labour cost that Eurostat reports for administrative and support services, the sector that includes security activities. It is 27.7% of labour cost in France (2025), 27.7% in Belgium (2024) and 27.6% in Spain (2025). On top of the wage, that adds about 38% in each.

These numbers are floors. They leave out sickness absence, training and licence time, supervision, uniforms and any premium a sector agreement sets for night, Sunday or holiday hours. A contractor’s price adds its own overheads and margin on top. Read the table as the least a 24/7 post can cost under each country’s rules, and expect a real quote to sit above it.

The rates come from Service-public.fr for the French SMIC, the private security wage sheet of the federal employment service, SPF Emploi, for Belgium, and the 2026 to 2030 national security agreement in the Boletín Oficial del Estado for Spain. Working weeks and leave come from the French Code du travail (L3121-27, L3141-3, L3133-1), the same Belgian sheet, the Spanish agreement and the Estatuto de los Trabajadores. Employer charges come from Eurostat.

Your own site will differ in posts, hours and country. The guarding against remote monitoring comparison starts from these public floors and lets you change every field, then sets the cost of a remote set-up beside it.

How a guarded post is staffed

A post that never closes runs on a rota. Three shifts of 8 hours or two of 12 hours cover the day. Either way the rota needs relief for every day of leave, every public holiday and every sick day. That relief is why one post takes five or six people, and why a fraction such as 5.6 turns into six names on the rota unless part-time contracts or overtime fill the gap.

The EU Working Time Directive sets the outer limits. Workers get 11 consecutive hours of rest in every 24, a weekly rest of 24 hours plus those 11, an average week of no more than 48 hours including overtime and at least four weeks of paid leave. Normal night work may not exceed 8 hours a day on average. Article 17 lets member states depart from the rest, night and reference period rules for security and surveillance work that needs a permanent presence, provided workers get equivalent compensatory rest. National law and sector agreements decide how far each country uses that room.

National rules then set the normal week the pay floor is based on. France fixes it at 35 hours and the Belgian security sector at 37. Spain caps the week at an average of 40 hours over the year, and its security agreement sets 1,782 hours of effective work a year. Fewer hours per guard means more people per post, which is why France needs more guards per post than Spain in the table above.

What remote monitoring replaces, and what it does not

Remote monitoring replaces the watching. Cameras, video analytics and sensors on fences and doors send events to an operator off site. The operator checks the event on video, talks through a loudspeaker or intercom if there is one, and decides who goes. One operator can watch many sites, which is where the saving comes from.

It does not replace the person who arrives. Someone still has to stop an intruder, check a forced door, meet the fire service at the gate, give first aid or escort a contractor who turns up outside a booked window. That person is a guard or technician already on site, a keyholder, or a mobile patrol under contract. Their response time, written into the contract in minutes, decides how much of an incident remote detection actually prevents. A camera that sees an intruder at the fence saves little if nobody arrives for 40 minutes.

Remote monitoring also adds a dependency. Cameras, the site network and the link to the monitoring centre must keep working through a power cut or a network fault, or the site goes blind at the moment it matters. A guard at the gate has no such link to lose.

Where each option is stronger

The answer changes by incident. The table below sets out what each option does for the five classes the comparison tool models. It is a way to read your own risk, with no score added up.

A mixed design is common: remote monitoring for the whole site and a reduced on-site presence at the hours or entrances where the table favours a person. The comparison tool takes on-site hours as an input for that reason.

Questions to put to your insurance broker

• Does the property or business interruption policy make a staffed guard, a patrol or a stated alarm response a condition of cover?
• Must the insurer be told before the change, as a change in the risk?
• Which standard must the alarm system and the monitoring centre meet for the insurer to accept them?
• What response time to an alarm does the insurer expect, and who may act as keyholder?
• How long must video and alarm logs be kept to support a claim?
• Will the premium or the excess change, and from which date?

Ask for the answers in writing before the last guard shift ends.

A short checklist for the transition

1. Read customer contracts and the insurance policy for any clause that requires a staffed presence.
2. Map every entrance, fence line and blind spot, and place cameras and sensors so each one is covered.
3. Fix the response time in the contract with the keyholder or patrol, then test it at night and at weekends.
4. Decide who is on site at each hour and what they are trained to do in an incident.
5. Check data protection. Video of people is personal data under the GDPR, and Article 35 requires an impact assessment where processing is likely to be high risk. Tell staff and visitors.
6. Plan for a loss of power or network to the cameras and the link to the monitoring centre.
7. Run both set-ups side by side for a period before the guarding contract ends.

The comparison sits with the other cost and compliance tools in the Operate section.

Limits

The labour figures use the pay floors, working weeks, leave and public holidays in force when we read them on 18 October 2026, and Eurostat’s latest non-wage shares. A new agreement or a minimum wage rise changes them. They describe the least a post can cost under the rules, and only a tender gives a real price.