How Often Should Security Guards Patrol? Setting a Patrol Schedule

The honest answer

There's no single standard for how often security guards patrol. We looked for one from security bodies such as ASIS and from insurers, and didn't find a published, industry-wide rule. Frequency is set by whoever you answer to:

• The contract or post orders. If a client pays for patrols, the contract should say how often.
• Your insurer. Read your policy, and ask, especially for vacant or high-value property.
• A regulator. Fire watch, health care and jails have written intervals, shown below.
• The site's own risk. Everywhere else, it's your call.

Where written rules exist, they mostly land on hourly or every 30 minutes. Everywhere else, start with a sensible interval, then adjust it to what your incidents tell you.

What regulated settings require

Two patterns stand out. Hourly is the most common interval for fire watch, and 30 minutes shows up in health care, prisons and jails. And every one of these sets a maximum gap, not a time on the clock. Fire watch rules vary by jurisdiction, so read fire watch requirements before you set one.

Starting points by type of site

See HOA, warehouse, construction site and church patrols for example routes and checkpoints for each.

How to decide your patrol frequency

1. 01

   Start with what binds you

   The contract, post orders, insurer or regulator set the minimum. Write their intervals down first. Everything else goes on top.

2. 02

   Ask what an hour costs

   For each part of the site, ask what happens if a problem goes unnoticed for an hour. A propped fire door or a water leak gets worse by the minute; a locked storeroom usually doesn't. The bigger the cost of waiting, the shorter the interval.

3. 03

   Time the walk

   Walk the route at a normal pace, doing every check on it. A round has to be longer than the walk, with time left for whatever the officer finds. If the walk takes 40 minutes, rounds every 30 won't work: split the route, or add an officer.

4. 04

   Look at your incidents

   When and where do problems happen? Patrol more at those hours and places, and less where nothing ever does.

5. 05

   Write it down, then check it

   Put the schedule in the contract or post orders. Then use a system that knows the schedule, so you hear when a round is missed instead of assuming it wasn't.

Revisit the schedule after any serious incident, and whenever the site changes: a new building, a tenant moving out, the season the nights get longer.

A worked example

Say you manage an apartment complex. The contract says "hourly patrols, 10 PM to 6 AM." The route has 12 checkpoints, from the front gate through the garage levels to the pool, and walking it with every check takes about 25 minutes. You'd set:

• The window: every night, 10 PM to 6 AM.
• The rounds: every 60 minutes, because the contract says so, and the 25-minute walk fits with time to spare.
• A start alert: an email if nothing has been scanned 20 minutes into a round, while there's still time to call the officer.
• Extra checks where they matter: a photo at the garage gate, and "Gate locked?" at the pool.

Now say that after a month, the incident reports show car break-ins bunched between 2 AM and 4 AM in the garage. Add a second route for the garage alone, with rounds every 30 minutes from 1 AM to 5 AM, and leave the rest of the property hourly.

Fixed times or irregular rounds?

Rounds on the hour are easy to plan, and just as easy for anyone watching to predict. The federal prison system asks for the opposite. The DOJ Inspector General's June 2023 report on the Federal Bureau of Prisons quotes BOP policy that rounds "are to be conducted on an irregular schedule and no more than 40 minutes apart."

The same report shows how a paper record can fail. In the Jeffrey Epstein case, staff "did not conduct any 30-minute rounds after about 10:40 p.m.," and count slips and round sheets "were falsified to show that they had been performed." Round sheets there were meant to be initialed by officers and reviewed and signed by a supervisor. Irregular timing helps, but a self-reported record can still be filled in by someone who never walked.

Irregular timing with a round window

In PatrolBadges, a route's schedule is a window on the days you choose, like 10 PM to 6 AM every night, optionally cut into rounds every 15, 20, 30, 45, 60, 90, 120, 180, 240 or 360 minutes. A round is complete when every checkpoint is scanned between its start and end. It doesn't matter when within the round, so an officer can walk at 11:05 in one round and 12:50 in the next, and nobody watching can set a clock by it.

One thing to plan for: because each round only has to be covered once, two visits to the same checkpoint can be nearly two rounds apart, early in one round and late in the next. If your rule is a maximum gap, set rounds to half of it. For the BOP's 40 minutes, that's rounds every 20 minutes.

PatrolBadges doesn't generate random times for officers. The round sets the window, and the officer or their supervisor varies the timing within it.

Make sure the rounds actually happen

A schedule on paper is only as good as the check that it's followed. Put each route's schedule into a system that knows when each round is due, so it can tell you when one ends with a checkpoint missed, or hasn't started a set number of minutes in. Location stamps and too-fast flags catch rounds scanned from the break room.

How to verify security patrols walks through the setup. If you're starting on paper, the security patrol log is a printable version.