Overnight Patrol Math: Guard Hours Against a Robot Lease

Which overnight option costs less to run?

For most sites the answer is not found in an hourly rate. It sits in which costs keep climbing as the night gets longer. Guard billing grows with every posted hour. A security patrol robot lease, quoted as one fixed payment after a site assessment, does not grow with the hour, but the human time around that robot does.

That split is the whole model. Build the guard side from your contract, build the robot side from a written quote, and then add exception handling time to both. A comparison that skips exception time tends to favor whichever option was priced first, so put the minutes on the page.

What does an overnight guard hour cost on the wage side?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a May 2025 median annual wage of $38,020 for security guards, about $18.28 an hour. The same Occupational Outlook Handbook page projects employment in the occupation to grow 1 percent from 2025 to 2035, slower than average.

A wage is not what you pay. A contract guard bill rate is set by the contractor and covers more than base pay. Use the rate on your signed proposal, and confirm in writing whether any night premium applies rather than assuming one.

How do you structure the worksheet?

Keep it to one page with one row per cost, each with a unit, a quantity and a source document. Leave robot rows blank until a written quote arrives, because a headline rate with no stated scope says nothing about the rows that matter.

• Posted guard hours per night, times nights per year, for the coverage you actually contract.
• Contract bill rate per hour from the proposal, plus any night premium stated in writing.
• Call-out replacement cost for a guard who does not show, from the contract terms.
• Robot lease payment from the quote, converted to a yearly total.
• Service plan scope: which on-site dispatch and remote triage visits are included.
• Alert review: alerts per night, times minutes per alert, times your staff's loaded hourly cost.
• Incident response: events per year, times minutes on scene, times the loaded cost of whoever responds.

Which costs are fixed and which move with coverage hours?

Fixed costs are the robot lease payment over its term, the service plan baseline, and the mapping and setup done during deployment. These do not change whether the robot runs six hours or twelve, so they flatten your cost curve once signed.

Costs that move with hours are guard billing, any night premium, call-out replacements, and alert review staff time. Exception handling changes with events rather than clock hours, but a longer watch produces more events to handle, so the link to hours is real even though it is indirect.

Plot both options on a simple chart with hours on one axis. The guard line climbs steadily with each added hour. The robot line carries a fixed starting cost and rises more slowly, and where the two lines cross depends on your inputs, not on any headline figure.

What does a patrol robot still need a person to do?

An IPVM analysis of Knightscope patrol robots from 2016 found the cost gap looked much closer once guard billing and wages were set side by side. It also noted those robots could not climb stairs, open doors, or act on their own. We reviewed the IPVM summary as of November 2026. That was a finding about one generation of hardware, so check the spec sheet for the exact model you are weighing.

Human steps stay with any patrol program. Someone reads the alert, decides whether to dispatch, and closes the event. Those minutes belong in your exception row, and a quote that leaves them out is incomplete no matter how low the headline looks.

What did an early public robot patrol test show?

In 2016, news coverage reported that Uber used a patrol robot in a parking lot, and described the robot as cheaper than a security guard. The coverage did not give cost figures we could verify, so read it as one company's trial report, not a benchmark for your site.

Where does Service Robot Co. fit into the math?

Service Robot Co. is OEM neutral, so the worksheet starts from the patrol route and the coverage job, not from one manufacturer's catalog. A site assessment maps the route, lighting and gates first. The lease quote follows as one fixed payment on a three year lease, arranged through lease financing programs.

Every unit is serviced under our RoboCare service plan, with on-site dispatch and remote triage handled by regional service engineers in each state we service, and a backup robot program can cover downtime. Ask any integrator, us included, to show in writing which of those items sit inside the quoted payment.

How should you decide before the quote arrives?

Run the sheet twice: once with the guard hours you have posted, and once with the coverage you want to add. If a robot wins only at reduced hours, you have learned where robots help, which is on predictable loops rather than posts that must answer every door.

Bring the completed sheet to the site assessment. Mark each row as fixed or variable, and ask the integrator to fill the robot rows from a written quote rather than a headline rate. A worksheet that stays honest about its blanks will tell you more than a fast winner.