The Job That Sees It: The Close-Protection Detail
The Million Dollar Question: In 2025 Meta reported paying $124,527 for personal security services for one of its executives — not the chief executive, and not the chief financial officer. Because the benefit was taxable to him, the company also paid the tax. How much was the tax?
A) $18,679 B) $43,584 C) $86,112 D) $138,466Read on for the answer.
Start with the number a reader came for. The US federal government prices Security Guards at a $42,470 annual mean across 1,283,470 people, on a $38,020 median, with a 90th percentile of $58,840 — that is the May 2025 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics estimate, the most recent there is.
Now the private aggregators, which use the job titles the trade itself uses. On 1 November 2026, Salary.com priced an Executive Protection Officer at $68,841 and, on the same day, an Executive Protection Specialist at $121,375. One publisher, one date, the same work under two titles, 1.76 times apart — and each page labels its own headline figure both the average and the median, which is a property of a model rather than of a measurement.
Both are real measurements, and arguably neither is of this job. The federal occupation is defined by premises rather than by people, and the survey it comes from excludes private households by rule. The private figures describe the right job and disclose no sample size at all. Meanwhile the only exact figures anywhere for what protecting one named individual costs come from a source with nothing to do with the labour market: the filings of public companies, which have to tell you.
Bodyguard salary: four federal occupations, and the job is in none of them
There is no federal occupation called bodyguard. A person who guards another person for money is, in the 2018 Standard Occupational Classification, coded into one of four buckets depending on who employs him and what else he does.
| Occupation (SOC), May 2025 estimates | Employment | Annual mean | Annual median | 90th percentile |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Security Guards (33-9032) | 1,283,470 | $42,470 | $38,020 | $58,840 |
| First-Line Supervisors of Security Workers (33-1091) | 81,480 | $59,900 | $55,940 | $92,260 |
| Protective Service Workers, All Other (33-9099) | 81,500 | $48,070 | $42,540 | $74,590 |
| Police and Sheriff’s Patrol Officers (33-3051) | 670,520 | $79,200 | $76,210 | $115,120 |
Read the first row’s own definition and the problem is immediate: “Guard, patrol, or monitor premises to prevent theft, violence, or infractions of rules. May operate x-ray and metal detector equipment.” It is a job description for a building. The largest employing industry is Investigation and Security Services at 768,900 people, followed by elementary and secondary schools, general merchandise retailers, hospitals and hotels. Where the occupation pays best is stranger still: on the same source, the top-paying industry for security guards is Natural Gas Distribution at $44.01 an hour, ahead of instrument manufacturing, oil and gas extraction and aerospace. Pipelines and plants, not people.
The third row is the catch-all — “all protective service workers not listed separately” — and it is where a close-protection officer on a company payroll would most plausibly land. It holds 81,500 people, and its single largest industry is again schools.
Here is the test that matters. Salary.com’s Executive Protection Specialist figure of $121,375 is higher than the 90th percentile of every one of those four occupations, police included. Either the job sits in the top tenth of the best-paid protective occupation in the country, or the federal survey is not looking at it.
Mostly the latter, and by construction. The OEWS technical notes say it in two flat sentences: the survey “does not include the self-employed, owners and partners in unincorporated firms, household workers, or unpaid family workers,” and “Private households (NAICS 814) are also excluded.” A protection officer on a family’s own payroll, or self-employed and invoicing without incorporating, is outside the survey before anyone asks what he earns. Two further cautions from the same notes, both load-bearing for a job worked in twelve-hour shifts and multi-week trips: the annual figures are an hourly rate multiplied by a notional 2,080-hour year, and “May 2025” is a three-year rolling window — “six semiannual panels” reaching back to November 2022.
How much does a bodyguard cost, and why that is not a salary
The other common version of this question asks about cost, which is a different quantity. What a client pays includes the agency’s margin, the relief officer, the vetting, the insurance, the vehicle, and the hours nobody is working but somebody is being paid for.
The published rate guides are consistent in shape and unreliable in detail. One 2026 industry guide puts an executive protection agent at $75–$200 an hour, armed protection at $100–$300+, daily coverage at $800–$5,000+, a monthly programme at $20,000–$150,000+ and a full-time programme at $500,000–$5 million+ a year. Another, updated in November 2026, prices unarmed officers at $25–$45 an hour, armed at $40–$75, and “executive protection or close personal protection” at $75–$150.
Neither page states a sample size, a method or a source, and both contradict themselves within a single screen. The first page’s own summary block says executive protection “typically costs between $150 and $300+ per hour,” against its table’s $75–$200. The second gives unarmed officers as $25–$45 in its table and $20–$40 in its body text, and quotes an eight-to-twelve-hour day with one agent at $600–$1,200 — a ceiling its own hourly figures overshoot by $600, since $150 across twelve hours is $1,800.
What the shape does tell you is where the money goes, because the binding constraint is not the rate but the clock. A single post covered continuously is 168 hours a week. At the bottom of that guide’s executive-protection band, $75 an hour, that is $12,600 a week and about $655,000 a year for one protected position — this piece’s arithmetic on the guide’s own figure, and before a second officer, a car, or any travel. At $150 an hour the same single post is roughly $1.31 million. The reason household security budgets jump by an order of magnitude is almost never that someone hired a more expensive person. It is that someone decided the coverage could not stop at night.
The answer is D: the tax cost more than the protection
The answer is D — $138,466, and the executive is Meta’s chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth. Meta’s 2026 proxy statement reports for 2025 “approximately $124,527 … for costs related to personal security services and $138,466 … for associated tax gross-ups for taxable personal security services.” The tax on the benefit cost the company 11% more than the benefit.
That is not an error, it is compounding. A gross-up that leaves the recipient whole has to cover the tax on itself, so at a combined marginal rate r it costs the employer the benefit multiplied by r/(1−r). Work backwards from Meta’s two figures and the implied rate is about 52.7% — consistent with a combined federal, state and Medicare rate in a high-tax state, though the filing states no rate, says nothing about where any officer pays tax, and the calculation is this piece’s, not Meta’s. The same ratio appears for chief financial officer Susan Li, at $35,261 of security and $39,207 of gross-up. For chief operating officer Javier Olivan the ratio is lower — $1,027,700 of security against $913,076 of gross-up, implying about 47.0% — but his figures are not comparable with the others: the same filing discloses that his amounts were converted at a USD-euro rate of 1.1599, so a different jurisdiction and an exchange rate both sit inside that ratio.
Not every filing addresses this, and it is worth being exact about what Anthropic’s does not say. Its S-1, filed on 26 October 2026, discloses $2,745,874 of personal security services for its chief executive with no gross-up beside it — but it states no policy on grossing up security. The one place it addresses income tax on a personal benefit is its travel policy, where the value of personal use “will be treated as taxable compensation to the executive, and we do not cover, reimburse, or otherwise ‘gross-up’ any income tax due from any applicable executive on such compensation”; its governance table separately rules out excise-tax gross-ups on change-of-control payments. On security the filing is silent. So the accurate statement is that Meta discloses a gross-up and Anthropic discloses none — not that the two companies chose opposite treatments.
What protecting one person costs, from the employers obliged to say
Because executive security is reportable compensation, the clearest figures in this whole subject sit in filings rather than in salary surveys.
Meta’s committee has authorised what the proxy calls an “overall security program” for Mark Zuckerberg, on the stated ground of “specific threats to his safety arising directly as a result of his position as our founder, Chairman, CEO, and controlling shareholder.” The company adds that it requires the measures “for the company’s benefit.” What that programme costs, from the same filing:
| Component | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Personal security at residences and during personal travel | $9,431,139 | $10,433,377 | $8,498,301 |
| Annual pre-tax security allowance | $14,000,000 | $14,000,000 | $14,000,000 |
| Private aircraft, personal use | $968,828 | $2,585,583 | $2,467,562 |
| Facilities improvements to facilitate travel | — | $200,913 | $160,040 |
| Reported “All Other Compensation” | $24,399,967 | $27,219,873 | $25,125,903 |
The allowance is the unusual item: $14 million paid to Zuckerberg, net of withholding, which he “must apply … towards additional personnel, equipment, services, residential improvements, health and safety services, or other security-related costs,” with unused amounts carried to other years. The rows above sum exactly to the reported total in each year, which is the arithmetic check worth doing; his salary is $1, so his entire reported pay for 2025 — $25,125,904 — is the security programme plus an aeroplane plus a dollar.
Scale that against the labour market it buys from: the residential-and-travel line alone, $8,498,301, is about 200 times the $42,470 federal mean for a security guard, and the full $25.1 million about 592 times.
Anthropic’s filing is the newer and, for this purpose, the more specific document, because it names the categories the money bought. “A leading security consulting firm conducted independent, third-party security studies regarding the personal and security risks of our Chief Executive Officer and our President,” and on that basis the board identified “bona fide business-related, heightened security concerns.” The 2025 measures were “(i) individual protection services (including during personal travel), which included the protection of family members, as well as enhanced home security systems and surveillance, (ii) private car and driver services for ground transportation, and (iii) in the case of Dr. Amodei, the use of private aircraft for both business and personal travel.” The cost: $2,745,874 for Dario Amodei’s personal security services and $97,055 for personal private-air travel required by the programme, against a base salary of $654,167 — security at about 4.2 times salary. Daniela Amodei’s protection, home security and transportation came to $1,293,629. The chief financial officer got none in 2025 beyond business-related travel; the filing notes that the company “began offering certain security services to Mr. Rao” afterwards.
Two features of these numbers deserve saying out loud. They are the cost of a programme, not the pay of the people in it — officers, vehicles, alarms, cameras, monitoring and travel, with no split disclosed. And they exist only because the employer is a public company: the same household, protected by the same firm, paid for out of a family office rather than a listed issuer, generates no disclosure at all.
The licence register counts 25,166 grants, and the regulator says many went to door staff
Britain regulates this work directly, which ought to give a cleaner population count than America’s does. It nearly does.
Guarding “one or more individuals against assault or against injuries that might be suffered in consequence of the unlawful conduct of others” is a designated activity under the Private Security Industry Act 2001 — Schedule 2, paragraph 2(1)(c), made licensable through section 3 — and it is licensable conduct where it is carried out under a contract for the supply of services. The Security Industry Authority answered a freedom-of-information request in April 2026 with the exact counts: close-protection licences granted were 5,696 in 2020, 6,283 in 2021, 4,987 in 2022, 3,620 in 2023 and 4,580 in 2024 — 25,166 over the five years. A separate SIA response puts 454,961 licence holders across all sectors as at 1 April 2026. A licence runs three years and costs £204 to apply for since 1 April 2026, up from £184 when a historic-reserves rebate was withdrawn; the government’s own Regulated Professions Register still prints £190, so even the fee has two official figures.
Grants are not a headcount: a three-year licence mixes new entrants with renewals, and the SIA publishes no stock figure for close protection. But the regulator has said something more damaging to the count than that. Announcing top-up training in 2022, which made a first-aid qualification and new top-up training — physical intervention, door-supervision responsibilities and terror-threat awareness — mandatory before renewal, the SIA noted: “The SIA recognises that many close protection licence holders work primarily as door supervisors.” The close-protection licence also authorises door supervision and security guarding, so it is the useful licence to hold whatever you actually do.
And then the exemption that undoes the exercise. The SIA’s own guidance, updated in January 2026, triggers the licence only where the work is part of a “contract for services” — an agency supplying you to a client. “You do not usually need an SIA licence if you will be working ‘in-house’. This is when you are employed directly by the company that uses your services.” Two activities are licensable either way: door supervision at licensed premises, and vehicle immobilising in Northern Ireland. Close protection is not one of them.
That guidance is written about companies; the government’s Regulated Professions Register puts the private case plainly, saying no licence is usually needed where you are “employed directly by the company or individual that uses your services.” So the protection officer supplied by an agency and billed to a wealthy household needs a licence, and the one hired onto that household’s payroll does not. Britain’s register and America’s wage survey are blind in precisely the same place, for different reasons, and it is the place this series is about.
Being available is not the same as being at work
The best descriptions of what the job consists of are in litigation, because that is where someone has to specify the hours.
In Quarles v. Hamler the Eleventh Circuit set out, in a 2016 unpublished opinion, the facts of a five-year engagement: “For five years Hamler employed Quarles as a personal security guard.” The court recorded that Quarles “did not work for anyone else during the entire five years,” that “Hamler expected Quarles to guard him at all times that Hamler was working or traveling,” and that the district court found Hamler had told Quarles he could not work for anyone else. A jury awarded $65,497.50 in unpaid overtime; the district court added the same amount again in liquidated damages, plus fees, and the appeal against the liquidated damages failed because the employer’s reliance on his accountants was found not credible. Exclusivity and permanent availability were the facts that made him an employee rather than a contractor — and they are also the plainest statement anywhere of what the service is.
The economics of the contract-labour end of the trade appear in the other kind of case. In December 2023 the Department of Labor sued a Detroit firm supplying armed guards to cannabis dispensaries, alleging in its complaint that the defendants “failed to pay their security guards 1.5 times their regular rates for hours worked in excess of 40 in a workweek. Instead, Defendants paid their security guards their regular rates for all hours worked” — and that some guards were treated as exempt executives without meeting the $684 weekly salary level the Department pleaded under the executive exemption. The complaint notes a prior investigation of the same employer covering 2019 to 2021, and that $25,587.37 from it was still outstanding as of October 2023.
Worth being careful about what the overtime rules say here. 29 CFR 541.3(b) strips the white-collar exemptions from “police officers, detectives, deputy sheriffs, state troopers, highway patrol officers, investigators, inspectors, correctional officers, parole or probation officers, park rangers, fire fighters, paramedics, emergency medical technicians, ambulance personnel, rescue workers, hazardous materials workers and similar employees, regardless of rank or pay level,” and the duties it lists include “performing surveillance” and “pursuing, restraining and apprehending suspects.” The rule is drawn by occupation and duty rather than by who employs you, private security guards are not among the occupations it names, and whether a protection officer falls inside its “similar employees” catch-all is a question the text leaves open. The Detroit case turns instead on the ordinary executive exemption — salary level and duties — which is how a job defined by being available at all hours ends up argued as a question of whether the hours counted.
What people get wrong
That there is a bodyguard salary. There are four federal occupations a protection officer might be coded into and a private-sector figure, $121,375 as read on 1 November 2026, that exceeds the 90th percentile of all four. The federal survey excludes private households and the self-employed by rule, so for the household version of this job it is not a low estimate — it is not an estimate.
That the aggregator figures are measurements. One publisher, on one day, gives $68,841 and $121,375 for the same work under two titles, calls each figure both the average and the median, states no sample size, and describes its method only as job postings and third-party data. Its industry table prints an identical $145,650 for every industry it lists.
That the cost to the employer is the pay. A single continuously covered post is 168 hours a week. At the bottom of the published executive-protection band that is about $655,000 a year before a second officer or a vehicle, and the figure moves with the coverage decision rather than the hiring decision.
That the big disclosed numbers are salaries. Meta’s $25.1 million and Anthropic’s $2.8 million are programme costs — personnel, residences, monitoring, vehicles and aircraft, with Anthropic’s air travel reported on its own line — and neither filing breaks out the people from the hardware.
That a licence register tells you how many of these people there are. The SIA granted 25,166 close-protection licences across five years, on three-year terms that mix renewals with entrants, to a population the regulator itself says works largely on doors; and in-house protection officers need no licence at all.
That protecting the principal is mostly action. The two clearest legal records of the work describe exclusivity, availability and hours — a man who could not take other employment and was expected to be present whenever his employer was working or travelling. The dispute was never about what happened. It was about what the waiting was worth.
Bottom line
What the job pays, as best the record shows: $42,470 as the May 2025 federal mean for 1,283,470 security guards, on a $38,020 median and a $58,840 90th percentile, in a survey that excludes private households and the self-employed; $68,841 and $121,375 from one aggregator on 1 November 2026 for two executive-protection titles, neither with a stated sample size; $75 to $200 an hour, or $800 to $5,000 a day, in the published cost guides, which contradict themselves; and $2.8 million and $25.1 million as the disclosed annual cost of two named individuals’ security programmes, which is not a wage at all.
The gaps are the information. The federal survey measures a licensed trade whose centre of gravity is a lobby desk, and whose best-paid industry is a gas utility. The aggregator measures the right job with no method. The cost guides measure what a firm will quote. The filings measure a programme, exactly, for two people, because the employer had to file.
So the honest version of the query has three clauses rather than one: employed by whom, covering how many hours, and armed or not. The two public registries that ought to answer it — America’s wage survey and Britain’s licensing regime — both stop at the same boundary, where the employer is a private individual rather than an establishment. That is not an oversight in either system. It is what both were built to leave out, and it is where this particular job mostly lives.
Methods and sources.
Federal occupational data. All wage and employment figures for Security Guards (SOC 33-9032), First-Line Supervisors of Security Workers (33-1091), Protective Service Workers, All Other (33-9099) and Police and Sheriff’s Patrol Officers (33-3051) are May 2025 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics estimates — the most recent release — read on 6 November 2026 from the OEWS Profiles tool at data.bls.gov. A retrieval note, because it affects anyone checking this: BLS discontinued its static per-occupation pages after the May 2024 estimates, so the bls.gov/oes/current/oes339032.htm URLs that most articles still cite no longer return current figures; the live figures exist only inside the JavaScript applications at data.bls.gov, and the bulk files were not used here.
For 33-9032: employment 1,283,470 (relative standard error 0.4%), hourly mean $20.42, annual mean $42,470 (wage RSE 0.4%), hourly median $18.28, annual median $38,020, and annual percentiles of $30,210 (10th), $35,210 (25th), $46,200 (75th) and $58,840 (90th). For 33-1091: employment 81,480, annual mean $59,900, annual median $55,940, 90th percentile $92,260. For 33-9099: employment 81,500, annual mean $48,070, annual median $42,540, 90th percentile $74,590. For 33-3051: employment 670,520, annual mean $79,200, annual median $76,210, 90th percentile $115,120. The top employing industries for 33-9032 are Investigation and Security Services (768,900), Elementary and Secondary Schools (58,300), General Merchandise Retailers (51,740), General Medical and Surgical Hospitals (49,340) and Traveler Accommodation (31,310). The top-paying industries, from the same tool on the hourly-mean measure, are Natural Gas Distribution ($44.01), Navigational, Measuring, Electromedical and Control Instruments Manufacturing ($34.79), Oil and Gas Extraction ($34.60), Aerospace Product and Parts Manufacturing ($33.46) and Nondepository Credit Intermediation ($32.94); that list is capped at five rows by the tool and is not exhaustive.
The occupational definitions quoted — including the exclusion of police officers from 33-9032 and the “all protective service workers not listed separately” wording for 33-9099 — are the 2018 SOC definitions as the OEWS tool displays them. The statements that the survey does not reach private households or the self-employed are quoted from the OEWS technical notes for the May 2025 estimates: the survey “does not include the self-employed, owners and partners in unincorporated firms, household workers, or unpaid family workers,” and “Private households (NAICS 814) are also excluded.” The same notes are the source for the 2,080-hour annualisation convention and for the statement that the May 2025 estimates draw on “six semiannual panels collected over a 3-year period.” Nothing here claims that any individual counted in these occupations does or does not guard a person; the exclusions, not an inference about coding, are the basis for every statement that the federal survey does not price private-household protection. The median and employment figures on the Occupational Outlook Handbook page for security guards come from a different BLS programme and should not be mixed with the OEWS counts.
Private salary aggregators. Both Salary.com pages were read twice on 6 November 2026, by two different retrieval routes, and both reads agree. The Executive Protection Officer page gives $68,841 and the Executive Protection Specialist page gives $121,375, each printed “As of November 01, 2026” and “Last Updated on November 01, 2026”, with 10th-to-90th percentiles of $56,696 to $76,794 and $103,243 to $140,522 respectively. Each page calls its headline figure the “average salary” in body text and labels the same number “50% (Median)” on its own chart; a distribution whose mean and median are identical to the dollar is modelled rather than measured, which is the basis for the remark in the text. Both describe their method only as data from employer job postings and third-party sources, and neither states a sample size. The specialist page’s top-industries table prints the identical figure, $145,650 at $70.0 an hour with a “Pay vs. Avg” of 20%, for all five industries listed, which is an artefact rather than a finding. An earlier retrieval of the same two pages on the same day returned $68,843 and $121,377 with September and October as-of dates — apparently a cached prior vintage — and the figures used here are the later, twice-confirmed ones; a reader checking on another date should expect the pages to have rolled again. The 1.76x spread is this piece’s arithmetic on $68,841 and $121,375. The claim that $121,375 exceeds the 90th percentile of all four federal occupations compares a private figure against published federal percentiles, and is offered as evidence that the two sources are not measuring the same population rather than as a ranking. A third aggregator, ZipRecruiter, was consulted but is not cited: its page could not be reached for verification from either a browser or a fetch (it answers automated requests with a bot challenge), so no figure from it appears in this piece.
Cost guides. The hourly, daily, monthly and annual ranges are from Security Guard Solutions (published 24 June 2026, modified 24 July 2026) and Personal Protection Solutions (published 19 May 2025, modified 2 November 2026). Neither states a sample size, a method or a source for its figures, and the internal contradictions described in the text are on the pages as printed. The $655,000 and $1.31 million figures are this piece’s arithmetic — 168 hours a week at $75 and at $150 an hour, multiplied by 52 — and are illustrative of what continuous coverage implies at a quoted rate, not an estimate of any real programme; they assume a single billed rate across all hours, which real contracts do not.
SEC filings. Meta Platforms’ figures are from its DEF 14A proxy statement filed 16 April 2026, covering fiscal 2025, in the “Perquisites and Other Benefits” discussion and footnotes (4), (5), (8) and (9) to the 2025 Summary Compensation Table. The quoted rationale, the $14,000,000 annual pre-tax allowance and its permitted uses, and the per-officer security and gross-up amounts are all verbatim or exact from that filing. The four components of Zuckerberg’s “All Other Compensation” sum exactly to the reported totals of $24,399,967 (2023), $27,219,873 (2024) and $25,125,903 (2025); that check is this piece’s. The implied marginal rates of about 52.7% (chief technology officer, and separately chief financial officer) and about 47.0% (chief operating officer) are this piece’s arithmetic from the disclosed pairs, using the identity that a full gross-up costs the benefit times r/(1−r); the filing states no rate and says nothing about any officer’s residence, filing status or tax affairs, and footnote (7) discloses that the chief operating officer’s amounts were converted at a USD-euro rate of 1.1599, so that ratio is not comparable with the others. These figures are offered as a reading of two disclosed numbers, not as a statement about anyone’s tax position. The 200x and 592x comparisons divide the 2025 security line and the 2025 total by the $42,470 federal mean, and are this piece’s arithmetic.
Anthropic’s figures are from the Form S-1 filed 26 October 2026 by Anthropic, PBC — a registration statement, not an annual report — in the “Security Services” discussion and footnotes (3) and (4) to its Summary Compensation Table: $2,745,874 of personal security services and $97,055 of personal private-air travel for Dario Amodei, $1,293,629 of personal protection, home security and transportation for Daniela Amodei, against base salaries of $654,167 each, and no security costs for Krishna Rao in 2025. The 4.2x multiple is $2,745,874 divided by $654,167. The quoted phrases — the security-consulting-firm sentence, “bona fide business-related, heightened security concerns,” and the three categories of 2025 measures — are verbatim from the “Security Services” discussion. The gross-up sentence quoted in the text sits in the preceding “Travel” subsection and attaches to the taxable value of personal travel, not to the security services; the filing’s only other gross-up statement rules out excise-tax gross-ups on change-of-control payments. The filing states no policy on grossing up security costs, and nothing here should be read as saying it declined to. The copy read carried blank placeholders in its offering-price fields, consistent with a pre-pricing filing; the compensation tables themselves were complete. The $25.1 million and $2.8 million figures set side by side in the text are not built the same way: Meta’s total includes personal private-aircraft use and facilities improvements, while Anthropic’s $2.8 million is the sum of its separately reported $2,745,874 of security services and $97,055 of personal air travel, and excludes the tender-offer spread and other items in its “All Other Compensation” column. Both companies describe these costs as incurred for the company’s benefit and as reportable compensation under the disclosure rules, which are different claims; this piece does not take a position on either, and makes no comparison between the two programmes’ adequacy.
UK licensing. The close-protection grant counts — 5,696, 6,283, 4,987, 3,620 and 4,580 for 2020 through 2024, totalling 25,166 — are from the Security Industry Authority’s freedom-of-information response FOI 0587, published 10 April 2026, which states that it cannot break the figures down by ex-forces status. These are licences granted in each year, and because a licence runs three years they mix new grants with renewals; the SIA publishes no stock figure for close protection alone, and the sector breakdown in its monthly licence-holder data set is released only as spreadsheets, which were not opened for this piece — so the number of close-protection licences currently in force is not stated here, because it was not obtained. The all-sector figure of 454,961 licence holders as at 1 April 2026 is from FOI 0598, published 5 May 2026, and is not comparable with the five-year grant total. The licensing rules, the definition of close protection, the “contract for services” trigger and the two activities licensable in-house are quoted from the SIA’s guidance page Find out if you need an SIA licence, last updated 29 January 2026. The statutory route is worth stating because the Act contains no express in-house exemption: the activity is defined at Schedule 2, paragraph 2(1)(c), becomes a designated activity under section 3, and is caught as licensable conduct only where carried out under a contract for the supply of services, while the separate provisions reaching in-house work apply to the Schedule 2 Part 2 activities — door supervision at licensed premises and vehicle immobilising — which do not include close protection. The in-house position therefore arises by absence rather than by exemption. The SIA guidance describes in-house as employment by “the company that uses your services” and so does not on its face reach a private individual; the wording covering an individual employer is the Regulated Professions Register’s, quoted in the text. The fee and term are from Apply for an SIA licence, last updated 19 June 2026, which states the fee changed to £204 on 1 April 2026 following withdrawal of a £20 rebate from historic reserves — hence the £184 figure in the text, which is that page’s arithmetic made explicit. The £190 figure appears on the government’s Regulated Professions Register entry for Close Protection Operative, which also gives the three-year term, cites section 3 of the Private Security Industry Act 2001 and states the in-house position; where the two official pages disagree on the fee, the SIA’s own guidance is the later document. The training requirements and the quoted observation that “many close protection licence holders work primarily as door supervisors” are from the SIA’s news item Top-up training introduced for close protection operatives, published 30 September 2022; that is a 2022 statement about a 2022 cohort and is not evidence about the 2024 grants, though it bears on how any grant figure should be read.
Litigation. Quarles v. Hamler, No. 15-13824 (11th Cir. 10 June 2016), is an unpublished per curiam opinion marked “DO NOT PUBLISH,” on appeal from N.D. Ga. No. 1:10-cv-01787. All quoted facts are from that opinion. The jury awarded $65,497.50 and the district court awarded the same amount again as liquidated damages; a widely cited law-firm summary describes the jury award itself as liquidated damages, which the opinion does not support. The Eleventh Circuit held it lacked jurisdiction over the employee-status and fee issues and affirmed the liquidated-damages order. The Department of Labor’s allegations against a Detroit security contractor are from the complaint in Su v. Detroit Body Guards Protection Unit, LLC, No. 2:23-cv-13175 (E.D. Mich., filed 13 December 2023), and are allegations only: no finding or judgment is reported here, the per-employee back-wage schedule was in an exhibit not reviewed, and the accompanying agency news release was not located. The $684 weekly salary level is the figure the Department pleaded in that 2023 complaint; the standard salary level for the executive, administrative and professional exemption has been the subject of rulemaking and litigation since, and no current figure is stated here because none was verified from a primary source. The text of 29 CFR 541.3(b) is quoted from the eCFR; the observation that private security guards are not among the listed occupations is a reading of the list as printed, and the regulation’s “and similar employees” catch-all is not interpreted here.
Not verified. ZipRecruiter’s figures for executive protection agents, whose page could not be reached. The number of close-protection licences currently in force in the UK. Any figure for how many people work in close protection in the United States, which no source consulted provides. The split between personnel, hardware and vehicles inside either company’s disclosed security cost. Whether any individual counted in the federal protective-service occupations guards a person rather than premises. The sample sizes behind any of the private salary aggregators, none of which publishes one.
Related reading: Personal Security: What Protection Actually Costs · The Job That Sees It: The Estate Manager · The Job That Sees It: The Yacht Captain · The Job That Sees It: The Butler · The Job That Sees It: The Housekeeper · The Job That Sees It: The Private Banker · Privacy: How the Wealthy Stay Unseen · Cybersecurity for Private Wealth · Staff: Outsourcing Daily Life
