A security company in Southeast Memphis hired 40 guards in January. By the end of June, 34 of them were gone. Some quit in the first week. A few made it a month. Most left for warehouse jobs at FedEx or Amazon, where the starting pay was $17 to $19 an hour with benefits on day one.
That company’s experience isn’t unusual. It’s the norm across Tennessee’s security industry in 2023, and the problem is getting worse, not better.
For every security firm operating in this state, the retention crisis isn’t a staffing inconvenience. It’s an existential threat to the service they’re selling. You can’t provide reliable security when your officers are leaving faster than you can train replacements.
The Numbers Don’t Lie
Turnover in Tennessee’s security guard workforce ranges from 100 to 200 percent annually, depending on the market and the company. Memphis sits at the high end. Some firms there have turned over their entire guard force twice in a single year.
Think about what that means operationally. A company with 100 guard positions isn’t just replacing 100 people. It’s replacing 150 or 200. Each replacement requires background checks through TDCI, orientation, site-specific training, and weeks of supervision before the new officer is reliable enough to work alone. The average cost of replacing a single security officer, including recruiting, screening, training, and lost productivity during the learning curve, runs somewhere between $3,000 and $5,000.
At a 150 percent turnover rate, a 100-person operation is spending $450,000 to $750,000 per year just on replacement costs. That money comes from somewhere. Usually it comes from the training budget, the equipment budget, or the supervisor’s capacity to actually supervise.
The result is a cycle that feeds itself. Undertrained guards provide poor service. Clients complain. The company can’t invest in retention because it’s spending everything on replacement. Guards see a dead-end job with no investment in their development, and they leave. The cycle repeats.
The Wage Problem
Here’s the fundamental math problem the industry refuses to solve. An unarmed security guard in Memphis earns between $13 and $14 an hour. That’s $27,040 annually before taxes, assuming full-time hours, which many guards don’t get because companies avoid the 40-hour threshold that would trigger overtime obligations.
Across the street, metaphorically speaking, the competition looks like this:
Amazon’s Memphis-area warehouses start at $17 to $19 an hour. FedEx, headquartered in Memphis and operating massive sorting facilities across the metro, starts at $18 or more for package handlers. Walmart distribution centers pay $16 to $20. Even fast food management jobs at McDonald’s or Chick-fil-A start in the $15 to $17 range and come with structured advancement programs.
A guard making $13.50 an hour can walk into any of those jobs tomorrow. No TDCI registration required. No uniform to buy out of pocket. No requirement to stand in a parking lot at 2 a.m.
Armed guards fare somewhat better, earning $16 to $19 an hour in the Memphis market. The additional training and firearms qualification create a barrier to entry that supports higher wages. Still, the gap between armed guard pay and warehouse work is narrow enough that the working conditions often tip the scale.
Nashville’s wage picture is slightly better across the board. Unarmed guards average $14 to $16 an hour. Armed positions pay $17 to $21. The higher cost of living in Nashville drives those numbers up, and the city’s tight labor market forces security companies to compete more aggressively.
In East Tennessee, wages drop further. Knoxville-area unarmed guards make $12 to $14. The lower cost of living provides some offset, and the competition from logistics and warehouse employers is less intense than in Memphis.
The Benefits Gap
Wages are only half the story. The other half is benefits, or rather, the near-total absence of them.
Most security guard positions in Tennessee offer no health insurance. No paid time off. No retirement contribution. No sick days. The guard who works 50 hours a week protecting your property gets nothing when she’s sick and nothing when she needs to see a doctor. She pays for her own uniform and sometimes her own equipment.
Compare that to Amazon, which offers health insurance from day one, a 401(k) with company match, paid time off, and career development programs. FedEx offers similar packages. Even Starbucks, a company that pays comparable hourly wages, provides health coverage to part-time employees working 20 or more hours per week.
Younger workers, the demographic the security industry desperately needs to recruit, won’t tolerate the absence of benefits. Workers under 30 rank health insurance and PTO as higher priorities than base pay in multiple workforce surveys. They’ve watched older relatives work jobs without safety nets and seen what happens when a medical emergency hits a household with no insurance.
The industry’s standard response to this has been to claim that margins are too thin to offer benefits. And there’s truth in that. Security contracts are often awarded based on the lowest bid. A company that includes health insurance costs in its bid price will lose to a company that doesn’t. The client saves money. The guards pay the price.
What Losing a Guard Actually Costs
When a trained security officer quits, the loss extends beyond the replacement costs. The client relationship takes a hit. The guard who left knew the property, knew the tenants, knew which doors stick and which cameras have blind spots. That knowledge walks out the door.
Site-specific training takes weeks. A new guard at a hospital campus, for example, needs to learn patient confidentiality protocols, emergency codes, visitor management systems, and the physical layout of buildings that might span several city blocks. A new guard at a distribution center needs to understand shipping schedules, access control zones, and theft patterns specific to that facility.
Every time a guard leaves, the clock resets. The client gets a learning officer who doesn’t know the property, doesn’t know the regular visitors, and might not even know where the fire extinguishers are. That’s not a security professional. That’s a warm body in a uniform. And clients know the difference.
Companies Doing It Differently
Not every security firm in Tennessee is stuck in this cycle. A handful of companies have broken from the low-bid model and built retention into their business strategy.
The approach varies, and no single formula works for every company. Common elements among the better-performing firms include starting wages at $16 or above for unarmed positions, health insurance contributions that make coverage affordable (even if the company doesn’t cover the full premium), and clear advancement paths from entry-level guard to supervisor to management.
One Memphis-area firm restructured its entire compensation model in early 2023, raising starting pay to $17 an hour and offering health insurance after 90 days. Its six-month retention rate jumped from 35 percent to 68 percent. The higher labor costs were partially offset by the elimination of constant recruiting and training expenses.
Career laddering is another approach gaining traction. Guards who earn additional certifications, complete supervisor training, or develop specialized skills (executive protection, healthcare security, fire safety) receive automatic pay increases. The path from $14-an-hour guard to $22-an-hour site supervisor gives employees a reason to stay.
Better equipment matters more than companies realize. Guards who are issued professional-quality gear, reliable radios, functioning flashlights, and proper uniforms feel like professionals. Guards who buy their own $30 flashlight from Walmart and wear a shirt that doesn’t fit feel like expendable labor. Because that’s what they are, at most companies.
The Existential Question
Tennessee’s security industry has spent the first half of 2023 growing faster than at any point in its history. The demand is there. Contracts are available. Clients are willing to pay more than they were a year ago. Every condition for a thriving industry exists except one: the workforce.
You can’t grow an industry when you can’t keep the people who do the work. And you can’t keep people who can walk across the parking lot to a job that pays more, treats them better, and gives them health insurance.
Some companies will figure this out. They’ll raise wages, offer benefits, invest in their people, and charge clients enough to make the model work. Those companies will capture the best officers, deliver consistent service, and build reputations that justify premium pricing.
The rest will keep running on the treadmill. Hire, train, lose, repeat. Their clients will keep getting new faces every month. Their service quality will stay mediocre at best. And their officers will keep finding the exit.
The retention crisis isn’t a problem the industry can hire its way out of. It’s a problem the industry has to pay its way out of. The firms that accept that reality in 2023 will be the ones still standing in 2028. The rest will be footnotes in somebody else’s growth story.