Private security workforce by country

Data  >  Private security workforce by country

How many private security guards the United States, Japan, South Africa, the United Kingdom and Australia have, year by year, from each government's own records, and, where the same official source also counts police, how many guards there are for every police officer.

Download the dataset (1.3 MB, zip, from Zenodo)  ·  Code and documentation

Source	US Bureau of Labor Statistics; National Police Agency (Japan); Private Security Industry Regulatory Authority (South Africa); Security Industry Authority (UK); Australian Bureau of Statistics
Covers	Varies by country, from 1986 (Australia) to 2026 (UK)
Size	2,534 figures, and one comparable figure per country and year (104 rows)
Format	CSV tables, with a documentation file, the source files and the code that builds and checks them
Version	1.0.0, published 29 October 2026
Licence	Data: CC BY 4.0. Code: MIT. Source material keeps its own terms (Open Government Licence for the UK, CC BY 4.0 for Australia, Public Data License 1.0 for Japan, public domain for the US).
DOI	10.5281/zenodo.23768201 (all versions)  ·  10.5281/zenodo.23768202 (this version)

What it is

How large the private security workforce is, and how it compares with the police, is hard to answer because the official figures are scattered across regulators, police agencies and statistics offices, each counting in its own way. This dataset brings the official counts for five countries into one file, with the source file and location of every figure.

In May 2025 the United States had 1,283,470 security guards against 670,520 police and sheriff's patrol officers, or 1.91 guards for every police officer, up from 1.69 in 2014. Japan had 596,985 security guards at the end of 2025, working for 10,949 authorised companies. South Africa had 577,444 security officers registered and recorded as employed in March 2023, out of 2,816,638 registered. In the United Kingdom 460,138 people held an active security licence in January 2026. Australia has had roughly as many guards as police since the early 2000s.

What it cannot be used to say

• The countries count different things, so the size of one country's workforce cannot be set against another's. Compare each country's trend over time.
• United States and Australia are employment surveys: they count people by occupation, whether they work for a security company or directly for another employer. Australia's quarterly figures move up and down from sampling alone, so the annual table averages the four quarters.
• United Kingdom figures count licence holders: a licence shows who may legally do licensable security work, not who is working, and some security roles need no licence. The rise to about 2008 reflects licensing being taken up.
• South Africa counts security officers registered with the regulator and recorded as employed; figures for 2013, 2024 and 2025 are missing.
• Police are included only where the same source counts both, so that guards and police are measured the same way. For Japan, South Africa and the UK the sources used give no matching police count.

How it was checked

• Japan: twelve years appear in more than one official publication, and every one agrees.
• United States: every figure for 2016 to 2023 was read twice, from the Bureau's web tables and its spreadsheets, and all match.
• Australia: the figures summed from the Bureau's detailed rows match its own summary table for all 80 figures checked.
• United Kingdom: where the Authority's 2021 and 2026 releases overlap they differ by less than 0.1 percent.
• South Africa: ten figures appear again in other reports or presentations of the regulator, and all match.

What is in the file

Countries

Country	Private security	Police	Years	Source
United States	Security guards employed	Police and sheriff's patrol officers employed	2014-2025	Bureau of Labor Statistics
Japan	Security guards employed by authorised security companies	not included	2007-2025	National Police Agency
South Africa	Security officers registered with the regulator and recorded as employed	not included	2011-2023	Private Security Industry Regulatory Authority
United Kingdom	People holding an active security licence	not included	2004-2026	Security Industry Authority
Australia	Security officers and guards employed	Police employed	1986-2026	Australian Bureau of Statistics

Files

File	Contents
data/clean/annual_by_country.csv	One comparable figure per country and year, with police and guards per police officer where available (104 rows)
data/clean/security_workforce.csv	Every figure used, one row per country, period and measure, including UK licences by sector, Japan's regular and temporary guards and company counts, and Australia's quarterly estimates (2,534 rows)

Columns

Column	Meaning
country	Country
period	Year (YYYY), month (YYYY-MM) or date (YYYY-MM-DD) the figure refers to
period_type	year_end, month, mid_quarter_month or date
workforce	private_security or police
measure	What is counted, for example guards_employed, licence_holders, active_licences_door_supervision, security_companies
value	The figure, exactly as published (Australia: summed across sexes and states)
unit	persons, thousand persons, licences or companies
rse_pct	United States only: the survey's relative standard error of the estimate, in percent
source	The agency that published the figure
source_file	The file in data/raw/ or the address it came from
source_location	Where in that file the figure is

Cite

Azom, Kazi Affnann (2026). private-security-workforce: official counts of private security guards by country, with police where the same source counts both (Version v1.0.0) [Data set]. Mercenomics. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23768202

The DOI above is for version 1.0.0. To always point to the latest version, use 10.5281/zenodo.23768201. Found an error? Report it on the Corrections page.