Commercial Fire Alarm Monitoring Cost, Inspection Prices and Technician Rates in Public Bids, 2022 to 2026

The market in brief

• Monitoring: five bidder prices from three public solicitations put central station monitoring at $14.25 to $59.00 per account per month, a median of $25.00 (2023 to 2024).
• At the median, a year of monitoring costs $300.00 per account; the bid range works out to $171.00 to $708.00 a year.
• Inspection: 152 building-level prices had a median of $300.00 and an interquartile range of $118.75 to $652.00 per building per year.
• Pricing basis: of 9 documents with an inspection price, 4 priced per building, 4 used a portfolio lump sum and 1 priced per device ($4.60 per device per year, St. Lucie County schools, Florida).
• Labor: 22 bidders quoted regular technician rates from $75.00 to $330.00 an hour, median $147.50; after-hours rates carried a median premium of 50%.
• Federal check: 189 GSA schedule ceiling rates for fire alarm technicians and mechanics have a median of $175.37 an hour (current 2026-10-27).
• Billed versus paid: the median local bid rate is 5.11 times the $28.88 national median wage for the occupation; the wage excludes benefits and overhead.
• Same buildings, different bids: in Lynchburg, Virginia (2024), bidder medians for the same 38 buildings ranged 13.04-fold.

Commercial fire alarm monitoring cost in public contracts

Monitoring is the cheapest line in a fire alarm contract and the most uniform. Five bidder prices from three solicitations sit between $14.25 and $59.00 per account per month, and three of the five fall between $25.00 and $40.00.

Central station monitoring: A listed monitoring center receives alarm, supervisory and trouble signals from a building's fire alarm panel over a cellular, radio, IP or phone-line communicator and calls the fire department. Agencies buy it per monitored account or per building, usually as a monthly fee.

The lowest price is an award: Montgomery County Public Schools, Maryland pays $14.25 per site per month for the 2024 to 2025 term; the bid's item specification asks for one unit price per site per month and bases the award on 240 locations. The same contract lists communicator installation at $676.00 each, a one-time charge that does not appear in the monthly fee.

Lynchburg, Virginia asked for monitoring as an annual price per building in April 2024. Two bidders entered $300.00 for nearly every building ($25.00 a month); the third entered $708.00 ($59.00 a month). Toms River Township, New Jersey received $40.00 per location per month for 12 buildings in March 2023.

Two documents price monitoring only as a portfolio total and cannot be converted to a per-account figure: Hialeah, Florida's September 2023 recommended award of $1,940.00 a month for all city sites, and Passaic, New Jersey's October 2025 low bid of $5,569.00 a year for monitoring and annual inspection together.

Annual fire alarm inspection cost: per building, per device or one lump sum

Inspection prices vary far more than monitoring. The median building price is $300.00 a year, but the middle half runs from $118.75 to $652.00, and the way an agency writes the bid sheet decides what the price even measures.

Building size drives much of the range: a fire station or cemetery chapel with a handful of devices and a courthouse or water treatment plant sit on the same list. Bidder pricing drives the rest. On the same 38 Lynchburg buildings, Eagle Fire's median annual test and inspect price was $100.00, VSC Fire & Security's $175.00 and Fire-X's $1,304.00, a 13.04-fold gap. The Lot 1 totals were $26,840.00, $58,405.00 and $212,816.00.

Only one document priced per device. St. Lucie County School District, Florida awarded testing and inspection at $4.60 per device per year in 2022, based on about 14,000 devices on 58 panels, for $64,400.00 a year. That is $1,110.34 per panel. The district re-bid the work in 2026 and published the old prices in an addendum.

Four documents bought inspection as one portfolio price, which hides the per-building cost: Hialeah ($12,045.00 a year), Passaic (monitoring and inspection together), Chatham County, Georgia ($28,336.90 and $37,500.00 for the first year, including maintenance) and Unalaska, Alaska ($17,280.00 to $30,406.00, with travel billed separately). For what the inspection must cover, see fire alarm inspection requirements.

Fire alarm technician hourly rates and the after-hours premium

Service call labor is where bids diverge most between agencies. 22 bidders quoted regular technician rates from $75.00 to $330.00 an hour, a 4.40-fold spread, with a median of $147.50.

After-hours, overtime or premium rates appear for 14 bidders. The median after-hours rate is $222.50 an hour, and the median premium over the same bidder's regular rate is 50%, the 1.5 multiplier. Seven bidders used exactly 50%, three more priced between 49.70% and 51.28%, and the outliers are Toms River's bidder (29.41%), Chatham County's Convergint bid (36.14%), Passaic's Sal Electric (62.16%) and Oxnard, California, where the sole bidder charged the same $125.00 for scheduled after-hours work and $135.00 for urgent after-hours calls.

Helper or apprentice rates are rarely priced separately. MHMR of Tarrant County, Texas received helper rates of $67.50 and $85.00 an hour in February 2024, or 69.23% and 85.00% of the lead technician rate. In Chatham County, Georgia, one bidder charged the same $202.00 for a helper as for a technician.

The two lowest rates were both selected: Protegis Fire & Security at $75.00 an hour for St. Lucie schools (primary repair vendor, 2022) and United Federation Systems at $95.00, the low bid in Passaic (2025) and the rate on its prior award. Most other rows are bids whose award is not stated on the tabulation.

Federal schedule rates as a national price check

GSA Multiple Award Schedule contracts publish ceiling rates for fire alarm labor that any federal buyer can order against. 189 technician and mechanic rates from 52 contracts have a median of $175.37 an hour, close to the local bid median.

One vendor dominates the count. Its contract lists a separate fire alarm security systems technician rate for each of 117 bargaining areas, with a median of $185.05. The 72 rates on all other contracts have a median of only $84.21, because many of them are Service Contract Act mechanic categories priced for facility maintenance contracts rather than licensed alarm service.

The metro rates show the regional spread inside one company's price list: $124.01 in the Cedar Rapids Quad Cities area to $242.21 in the Santa Rosa San Francisco area, 1.95 to 1. Premium categories confirm the local pattern: one contract prices emergency fire alarm technicians 75% above the matching regular level, and another prices weekend work at $255.72 against $170.48 on weekdays, 50% more.

Billed rate versus technician pay

The BLS median wage for security and fire alarm systems installers was $28.88 an hour in May 2025. The median local bid rate is 5.11 times that wage, and the median GSA technician rate 6.07 times.

Billed-to-paid ratio: Billed hourly rate divided by the median hourly wage for SOC 49-2098 in the same state (or nationally). It is a gross markup measure, not a margin: the wage excludes employer benefits, payroll taxes, vehicles, tools, training, licensing, insurance, supervision, unbilled time, overhead and profit.

By state of the bidding agency, the ratio runs from 3.13 in Alaska, where the occupation's median wage is the highest of the eight at $38.40, to 9.36 in Illinois, where both Highland Park bidders quoted above $200.00. The median across the 8 states with rates is 4.39. Each state rests on one to five bids, so these are illustrations, not state averages. Wage detail by state is in our fire alarm technician salary report.

The federal metro rates give a broader read because one price list covers 41 states and the District of Columbia. Their billed-to-paid ratio has a median of 6.34 and an interquartile range of 5.88 to 7.03. Lower ratios appear where technician wages are high (Oregon, 4.18); higher ratios where wages are low relative to a national price list (West Virginia, 7.69).

Agencies comparing their own quotes can use the tables here as a reference range; the find a provider directory lists licensed fire alarm contractors. Nothing in this report is a recommendation on what to pay.

Procurement documents behind the prices

Checked once at compilation; the registry is not re-checked on a schedule. Last checked 2026-10-27. Entries are neutral records of public data; each links to its source record.

Local benchmarks we calculated

Download the calculations (CSV)

What the numbers show

1. Montgomery County Public Schools, Maryland awarded fire alarm monitoring at $14.25 per site per month for the 2024 to 2025 term, the lowest monitoring price in the ledger.^[8]
2. Two of three Lynchburg, Virginia bidders priced monitoring at $300.00 per building per year for nearly every building ($25.00 a month) in April 2024; the third priced it at $708.00 ($59.00 a month).^[1]
3. Toms River Township, New Jersey received a bid of $40.00 per location per month for 12 monitored buildings in March 2023, or $5,760.00 a year.^[3]
4. Naperville, Illinois publishes a fee of $30.00 a month for city-run fire alarm monitoring by radio to its 911 center, checked 2026-10-27.^[13]
5. Across 152 building-level annual inspection prices in four solicitations (2023 to 2025), the median was $300.00 and the range $50.00 to $5,216.00.^[1][2][3][4]
6. In Lynchburg's April 2024 bid, Eagle Fire's median annual inspection price per building was $100.00 and Fire-X's was $1,304.00 for the same buildings; Lot 1 totals ran from $26,840.00 to $212,816.00.^[1]
7. St. Lucie County School District, Florida awarded testing at $4.60 per device per year to test about 14,000 devices on 58 panels under its 2022 award, $64,400.00 a year, or $1,110.34 per panel.^[7]
8. The median regular fire alarm technician rate bid to 10 public agencies in 8 states (2022 to 2026) was $147.50 an hour, with an interquartile range of $107.50 to $182.50.^{[1][4][6][9][10][11]}
9. The median after-hours or overtime rate across 14 bidders was $222.50 an hour; 7 of those bidders priced after-hours work at exactly 1.5 times their regular rate.^{[4][5][7][9][10]}
10. In Passaic, New Jersey (October 2025), four bidders quoted regular rates from $95.00 to $220.00 an hour, a 2.32-fold spread within one solicitation.^[10]
11. GSA schedule ceiling rates for one national vendor's fire alarm technician range from $124.01 (Cedar Rapids Quad Cities) to $242.21 (Santa Rosa San Francisco), a 1.95-fold metro spread, current 2026-10-27.^[14]
12. On GSA schedules, emergency categories cost 75% more than the matching regular category on one contract and weekend work 50% more on another.^[14]
13. The May 2025 national median wage for security and fire alarm systems installers (SOC 49-2098) was $28.88 an hour, $60,070.00 a year, across 86,340 jobs.^[15]
14. Federal schedule metro rates divided by state median wages give a billed-to-paid ratio of 4.18 (Oregon) to 7.69 (West Virginia), median 6.34, across 41 states and the District of Columbia.^[14][16]

Frequently asked questions

Related guides, services and research

• Fire alarm inspection requirements
• Find a fire protection company
• Requirement Finder: fire inspection checklist by building and system
• Fire Alarm Technician Salary by State and Metro
• Fire Deaths by State, 2013 to 2023
• Fire Department Response Time in 8 U.S. Cities
• Volunteer Fire Departments by State

Methodology

Question: what U.S. public agencies pay, or are bid, for fire alarm monitoring, annual testing and inspection, and service labor. Sources are primary procurement records only: bid tabulations, notices of intent to award, contract summaries and bid addenda posted by the agencies, plus one published municipal fee page and the GSA CALC+ ceiling-rate API. Contractor marketing pages and published 'average cost' figures are not used as data.

Inclusion: documents dated 2021 or later that print a unit price for monitoring, inspection or labor. Twelve procurement documents in 9 states qualified (earliest 2022-06-28, latest 2026-06-23). Excluded after opening: Jefferson County, Missouri (2020), New Haven, Connecticut (closed 2020), Lawrence, Massachusetts (2016 pricing) and Newton, Massachusetts (2018 results) as out of window; New York City DCAS fire alarm maintenance tabulations (totals only); a Gwinnett County, Georgia electrical tabulation (not fire alarm); Redmond, Washington and Tampa, Florida documents (no unit prices). Several agency hosts could not be reached from our connection and were not used.

Shortfall: the brief targeted 40 documents in 15 states. The shared web search budget for this research run was exhausted after the first queries, so the local ledger stops at 12 documents in 9 states. The federal schedule data (213 unique records, 42 states for metro rates) widens the geographic read for labor only. Medians from five to seven bidders are fragile and are labeled with their counts.

Normalization: monitoring is expressed per account (building or location) per month; Lynchburg's annual monitoring price is divided by 12. Inspection is per building per year using the annual test and inspect line; semi-annual visits and biennial sensitivity tests are separate lines. Tarrant County's commercial inspection is a 9-building total divided by 9. Labor is per hour as printed. A Highland Park line with one price and no N/A marker (Country Club) was attributed to Johnson Controls by its column position in the tabulation. Portfolio lump sums are reported but kept out of per-unit medians.

Statistics: medians and inclusive quartiles (Python statistics.quantiles). Monitoring and labor medians use one value per bidder per document; the inspection median uses every building-level price, with bidder-level medians shown alongside. Most rows are bids; award status is shown where the document states it. Prices are nominal and not adjusted for inflation.

Billed-to-paid ratio = billed hourly rate / BLS OEWS May 2025 median hourly wage for SOC 49-2098 (national $28.88; state values from state_M2025_dl.xlsx, released 2026-05-15). Limitations: the wage excludes benefits, payroll taxes and overhead; SOC 49-2098 includes security system installers; GSA figures are ceiling rates, and orders may be placed below them. GSA records were deduplicated by contract, title and price, and 14 manager, designer, engineer, programmer, supervisor and specialist titles were excluded.

This report describes prices public agencies were quoted or paid. It is not procurement, legal or financial advice. Code requirements for fire alarm testing are summarized on the site's inspection pages, as adopted by your state.

Last updated 2026-10-27. Every price row, with its document, date, unit, bidder and URL, is in registry.csv; the scripts that parse the tabulations and compute every figure are in the scripts folder.

This report presents published data with its limitations. It is not legal, engineering, financial or investment advice. Requirements depend on the code edition your state and local fire marshal have adopted; confirm with your authority having jurisdiction.

Sources, ranked by quality

Tier 1: primary and official sources (18)

• [1] City of Lynchburg, Virginia. Bid 2023-074 Fire Alarm, Sprinkler and Extinguisher Services bid tabulation (Lot 1 fire alarm). opened 2024-04-17. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [2] Park District of Highland Park, Illinois. RFP tabulation: 2025 Fire Suppression/Fire Alarm Testing & Maintenance. proposals due 2025-07-23. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [3] Toms River Township, New Jersey. 2023 Inspection, Testing, Monitoring, Maintenance and Repair of Various Fire Systems: unofficial bid results. opened 2023-03-30. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [4] MHMR of Tarrant County, Texas. RF 23-030 Fire Alarm and Sprinkler Inspection and Repair bid tabulation. 2023-08-24. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [5] MHMR of Tarrant County, Texas. RFP 24-004 Fire Alarm Installation and Services bid tabulation. 2024-02-01. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [6] City of Oxnard, California. Bid tabulation PW 23-81R On-Call Fire Alarm Systems Maintenance and Minor Repair Services (Rebid). bids received 2023-11-28. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [7] St. Lucie County School District, Florida. ITB 26-19 Fire Alarm Testing, Inspection & Repair, Addendum 1 (with ITB 23-02 tabulation attached). tabulation opened 2022-09-13; addendum 2026-05-29. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [8] Montgomery County Public Schools, Maryland. Summary of Contracts: Fire Alarm Monitoring, Bid 4107 Cycle 6. term 2024-09-08 to 2025-09-07. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [9] Chatham County, Georgia. Bid 26-0043-4 Annual Contract to Provide Fire Alarm System Inspections, Testing, Maintenance and Repairs (Sheriff): bid tabulation. bids due 2026-06-23. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [10] City of Passaic, New Jersey. Fire Alarm Monitoring Services, Equipment Annual Inspection Service and Maintenance 2025-2026: bid tabulation. 2025-10-28. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [11] City of Unalaska, Alaska. FY23 Annual Technical Services Agreement (fire alarm, sprinkler, special hazard) bid tabulation. 2022-06-28. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [12] City of Hialeah, Florida. Notice of Intent to Award RFP-2022-23-3230-36-051 Fire Alarm Monitoring, Maintenance, and Annual Testing. 2023-09-20. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [13] City of Naperville, Illinois. Fire Alarm Monitoring (Naperville Fire Department program page). as published 2026-10-27. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [14] U.S. General Services Administration. CALC+ ceiling rates API, keyword 'fire alarm' (Multiple Award Schedule awarded labor rates). rates current 2026-10-27. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [15] U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. OEWS May 2025 national estimates (oesm25nat.zip, national_M2025_dl.xlsx). May 2025. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [16] U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. OEWS May 2025 state estimates (oesm25st.zip, state_M2025_dl.xlsx). May 2025. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [17] U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics tables (May 2025 release page). May 2025, page modified 2026-05-15. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [18] Montgomery County Public Schools, Maryland. Item Specification: Fire Alarm Monitoring, Bid 4107 Cycle 6 (unit price per site per month, award based on 240 locations). 2023-08-24 to 2024-08-23 (dated 2023-05-16). Accessed 2026-10-27.