The 2026 Cost Stack on a Guarding Book

Manned guarding has always run on thin margins, so it notices when the cost of simply being compliant goes up. In 2026 it has, in two ways that owners feel directly, and both feed into what the business is worth. If you are looking at a sale in the next year or two, this is worth understanding cold, because a buyer certainly will.

Two Fee Changes Landed This Year

The first is the individual licence. From April 2026 an SIA licence application costs 204 pounds, after the temporary 20 pound rebate scheme ended at the end of March, and a renewal costs the same as a first application. The second is the Approved Contractor Scheme. From June 2026 the ACS fee payable per licensable individual deployed rose from 15 pounds to 25 pounds, described as the first rise in the annual registration fee in the history of the scheme.

A two-thirds increase in the per-operative ACS fee sounds minor on one licence. Across a workforce of dozens or hundreds of deployed officers, renewed on a rolling basis, it is a real addition to the cost of being in business. A smaller tightening sits alongside it: from June 2026 the 50 per cent discount on an additional licence applies only where the second application is made on the same day on the same form, where it used to be available at any time. None of these is dramatic on its own. Together they lift the floor under a guarding operation's fixed costs.

Pay Is the Bigger Pressure

The larger squeeze is on wages. Officer pay in guarding is usually at the National Living Wage, the SIA's 2022 sector profile found, and it names warehouse, delivery, logistics and supermarket work among the jobs officers leave for, offering higher pay, better benefits or more sociable hours. So you have a rising statutory pay floor and competition for the same people from outside the sector, at the same time. In a business where wages are the overwhelming share of the cost base, that is the number that governs the margin.

The difficulty is timing. Costs move up more or less immediately, but contract rates are often fixed for a period, so there is a lag between a cost rising and an owner being able to pass it on. That lag is exactly where margin gets lost.

Why This Reaches Your Valuation

Guarding earnings are labour-dependent and lightly protected, which is why a buyer looks closely at the margin. Manned guarding businesses typically sell on a multiple of EBITDA, meaning a buyer multiplies the yearly profit before interest, tax, and the write-down of equipment, vehicles and other assets by a set number. The multiple is applied to earnings, so when fixed costs rise faster than contract rates, the EBITDA figure gets thinner and the same business is worth less, even though nothing about its contracts has changed.

The practical response before a sale is to look hard at where the cost stack is either passed on or absorbed. That means reviewing contract terms and any indexation clauses, understanding your mix of work and which contracts carry the margin, and being able to show a buyer that your pricing keeps pace with your costs rather than trailing them. An owner who can evidence that has a far more defensible number than one whose margin is quietly eroding. This is one of four forces reshaping security values this autumn, which we set out in full in our cost stack and value stack briefing.

Nick Hunt leads the work on raising what a business is worth before a sale, from margin to owner dependence, meaning how much of the business still runs through you.