Security Guard Nights, Overtime and SIA Licence Costs 2026

Night premiums: who gets them and what they are worth

The night premium belongs to the guards who work while the building is empty: night security officers on 12-hour 7pm–7am rotas, door supervisors on pub and club doors past midnight, CCTV operators on the overnight monitoring shift. Day guards do not get it; that is the whole point. Where it is paid, it typically runs £1 to £2 an hour on top of the day rate — a contractual term that varies by employer, and worthless unless it is written into the offer.

A typical £1.50 premium turns £14.00 into an effective £15.50 an hour. On a 12-hour shift that is £186 against £168 on days — £18 a shift. On a 4-on-4-off nights pattern (42 hours a week on average) it is £651 a week against £588 on days, and £33,852 a year against £30,576. The premium is doing exactly what premiums are for: pricing the inconvenience of nights, the 8-hour night average that bounds them, and the smaller pool of guards willing to work them.

The premium also interacts with the rest of the pay packet in ways worth checking at interview. Some contracts pay the overtime multiplier on the night rate — time and a half on £15.50 is £23.25; some pay it on the day rate — £21.00. Some bank-holiday premiums replace the night premium rather than stacking with it. None of these is standard; all of them are contractual. Ask which rate each multiplier applies to, and get the answer in the offer letter.

The 8-hour night average

Night work in security is bounded by one rule from the Working Time Regulations: a night worker's hours must average no more than 8 in any 24-hour period. Twelve-hour night shifts are lawful inside that average — the limit is averaged over the reference period, not applied shift by shift — which is why the 12-hour nights rota is the trade standard rather than an infringement of it.

What counts as night work is typically the period the employer designates — commonly 11pm to 6am — and a night worker is someone who regularly works at least three hours during it. Most permanent night guards qualify. The practical consequence is that night rotas cannot legally creep the way day rotas sometimes do: the average is the average, and an employer who wants more hours from a night guard needs the rota to balance elsewhere.

The 48-hour average working week sits alongside it: the cap applies unless the worker agrees in writing to opt out. A 4-on-4-off pattern of 12-hour shifts averages 42 hours — inside the cap with no opt-out needed. Permanent 60-hour weeks on overtime need the signed agreement. It is a short document with long consequences; read it before signing, and know that you can withdraw the agreement with notice.

Overtime rates and how they are set

Beyond contracted hours, the common security structure is a multiplier on the basic rate — typically 1.25 to 1.5 times where a premium is paid at all. At the £14.00 median, that is £17.50 to £21.00 an hour. Some firms pay double time on bank holidays; some pay a flat enhanced rate for any hours beyond 40; and a sizeable share of the trade pays a flat rate for every hour, overtime included. Whatever the shape, it is wages — taxed, NI'd and pensionable like the rest — and the annual figure goes into the take-home calculator as part of the gross.

The arithmetic is worth doing on any offer with a low basic and a loud overtime promise. A guard on a 42-hour 4-on-4-off pattern at £14.00 (£30,576 a year) who works an extra shift a fortnight — 12 hours at time and a half, £21.00 — adds £6,552 a year, taking the gross to £37,128. That is a strong package, but notice what it depends on: the extra shifts actually existing, fortnight in and fortnight out. An advert quoting £37,000 for a '42-hour contract with overtime available' is quoting a hope, not a contract.

The question to ask the contract manager is not the overtime rate but the overtime volume: how many extra shifts does the average guard on this contract actually work? The rate is nearly always in the 1.25–1.5× band; the volume is what decides whether the package is £31,000 or £37,000.

The SIA licence: what £204 buys

The Security Industry Authority licence is the legal permission to do the job: without it, working as a security guard, door supervisor, CCTV operator or close-protection operative is a criminal offence. The application fee is £204 from 1 April 2026, and the licence lasts three years — roughly £68 a year for the right to work in the trade, before the training that comes first.

The training course precedes the application and depends on the beat: door supervision and security guarding are separate qualifications with separate courses, each costing a few hundred pounds, varying by provider. The course is where the real entry cost sits — the fee is fixed by the SIA, the course price is set by the market. Budget for both, and for the three-year renewal cycle: the licence expires, the work stops, and the fee comes round again.

One licence covers one sector, not all of them: a security guarding licence does not authorise door supervision work. Guards who move up the beats — retail to corporate to doors — typically add the door supervision qualification when they make the move, and the pay premium on the doors is what funds it.

Who pays for the licence?

This varies by employer, and it is one of the first things to establish before signing. Some firms — particularly the larger contractors and in-house corporate teams — pay the £204 application fee and the training course outright, treating it as the cost of staffing the contract. Some reimburse the fee after probation, typically three or six months. Some expect you to arrive already licensed and price the labour accordingly.

Where the employer deducts the cost from wages, one legal line matters: the deduction must not take hourly pay below the National Living Wage of £12.71. A £204 deduction spread over the first month's pay is £1.70 an hour off a 120-hour month — lawful at £14.00, but the maths gets tight at lower rates and shorter months. Check how the deduction is structured and over how many pay periods it is spread.

The renewal is the part people forget. Three years pass, the licence expires, and the guard who assumed the employer would handle it discovers the £204 is due and the rota has no shifts until it is paid. Put the renewal date in the calendar the day the licence arrives — and if the employer paid the first one, establish in writing whether renewals are on the same terms.

A night-shift year, added up

Take a guard on a 4-on-4-off nights pattern at the £14.00 median with a typical £1.50 premium: the effective rate is £15.50, the average week is 42 hours, and the base gross is £33,852 a year. Add an extra 12-hour shift a fortnight at time and a half on the night rate — £23.25 an hour, £279 a shift, 26 shifts a year — and that is £7,254 of overtime gross. The year's pay is £41,106 before a single bank holiday is counted.

That figure is doing a lot of quiet work. It assumes the premium is contractual and permanent, the overtime actually exists every fortnight, and the rota stays inside the 48-hour average (42 plus 6 overtime hours is 48 — exactly on the line, no opt-out needed). Change any of those assumptions and the year changes with it: no premium, and the base is £30,576; no overtime, and the year is the £33,852 base.

Run the pieces through the take-home calculator separately and add them, or gross the whole lot up and enter £41,106 as the salary — the engine does not care how the gross was assembled. What it cannot do is tell you whether the overtime will be there in February. Only the contract manager knows that, which is why the overtime volume is the last question to ask and the first one that matters.

Where the figures come from

The £14.00-an-hour base rate is the ONS ASHE 2025 provisional median for security guards and related occupations (SOC 9231), all employees, pay period April 2025. The SIA figures are the GOV.UK licence guidance: £204 application fee from 1 April 2026, licences lasting three years, separate licence types for door supervision, security guarding, CCTV and close protection. The hours law is the Working Time Regulations via GOV.UK's maximum weekly working hours guidance: 48-hour average week with written opt-out, night workers' hours averaging no more than 8 in any 24 hours.

Night premiums of £1 to £2 an hour, overtime multipliers of 1.25 to 1.5 times, and training courses costing a few hundred pounds are typical market structures that vary by employer or provider — not ONS data — and are labelled as such throughout. Take-home figures in the examples are computed on the 2026/27 England tax model with auto-enrolment on.

Reviewed and updated

The SIA fee, the hours law, the tax treatment of premiums and overtime, and the worked examples were last reviewed on 24 September 2026. The take-home calculator page turns any combination of rate, premium, hours and overtime into the monthly figure — use it with the numbers from your own offer, not the typical ones here.