School Security Systems: What K-12 Districts Actually Paid in 2026

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Related reading: what law enforcement agencies paid for facial recognition software.

Last verified: September 5, 2026. By Abbas Khan, who covers SLED buying for Civic IQ. He works from primary records: board agendas, adopted budgets and public purchase orders.

Across 82 K-12 school security awards recorded in 2026, districts paid a median of $54,498. Half of all awards fell between $15,947 and $181,332. The range ran from a $3,541 camera job at a single elementary school in Illinois to $1,826,553 for a district-wide paging, intercom and security system in Troy, Michigan.

Those are contract records, not estimates. The published guides give a range of $5,000 to over $500,000 per campus. That is not a price. It is a hundredfold spread, and it tells a buyer nothing. Below is what districts signed for, by system type, with the record count behind every figure.

What did districts actually pay in 2026?

A median of $54,498, across 82 awards in 28 states. The table below is the whole distribution, not a vendor estimate.

Building count drives the spread, not district size. A single-building project sits in the bottom quartile almost every time. Edison Township Public Schools in New Jersey paid $345,822 for access control at one school, John Marshall, because it was a full retrofit. Mount Gilead Exempted Village in Ohio paid $102,193 to replace 61 cameras across the whole district. Same order of magnitude. Very different scope.

The most surprising finding is what is not in the data: almost nobody is buying a first system. The awards are refreshes, replacements, expansions and renewals. Belton ISD in Texas approved $635,273 to “refresh and standardize” cameras on one platform across all its middle schools. That matches the national picture. National education statistics put camera use in public schools at 93% as of 2021-22. Controlled building access is at 97%. Cameras stood at 61% in 2009-10. The greenfield is gone.

What does each type of school security system cost?

Median cost runs from $14,664 to $128,100. Visitor management is the cheapest. Emergency notification is the dearest. Camera and access control work sits in between. Record counts are shown, because some categories are thin.

Civic IQ records, 2026. Read any category under 15 awards as indicative only. Visitor management, at n=6, is the thinnest cell in the table.

Access control and door hardware

Median $46,278, on 16 awards. The clearest per-door figure is Southern Lehigh Valley Middle School in Pennsylvania. It was quoted $71,500 for 11 doors in January 2026. That is about $6,500 a door. The price covers controllers, readers, electrified locks, exit sensors, cabling and programming. What moves it is new build against retrofit. Pocahontas in Iowa spent $136,309 replacing every interior door lock in one junior high, on a state safety grant.

Camera systems and video management

Median $63,457, on 28 awards. This is the largest category. Districts paid about $1,675 to $2,062 per camera, installed. Mount Gilead Exempted Village in Ohio replaced 61 Alta cameras for $102,193 through Motorola Solutions in June 2026. That is $1,675 each. Rio School District in California bought 66 cameras with five-year licenses for $136,073, or $2,062 each. Most of these bundle multi-year cloud licensing. So a per-camera price with no license term is not comparable. See our analysis of Verkada’s school safety contracts and of Motorola Solutions’ public sector contracts.

Weapon and gun detection

Median $67,500, on 18 awards. This is the fastest-moving category. Two models split the market. Software that runs on cameras you already own is priced per camera stream. Eunice Public Schools in New Mexico added 200 ZeroEyes licenses for $97,000. Adrian Public Schools in Michigan was quoted $32,000 a year for 100 streams, or $320 per stream. Hardware screening is priced per lane instead. Birmingham City Schools in Alabama bought 14 OpenGate units for $300,118, about $21,437 each.

Visitor management

Median $14,664, on 6 awards. It is the cheapest category and the thinnest cell. Districts usually buy it as a yearly subscription with kiosk licenses, not as a capital project. Berkeley County in West Virginia renewed at $189,000. That one bundled Raptor visitor management with wearable staff alert badges, gateways and beacons, which is why it sits so far above the median. See our Raptor Technologies contract analysis and the visitor management spend breakdown.

Emergency notification and panic alert

Median $128,100, on 12 awards. It is the most expensive category. These projects are district-wide by nature, which lifts the median. Troy School District in Michigan awarded $1,826,553 for a paging and intercom system from a capital projects fund. Weber School District in Utah has about $900,000 of installed cost left for panic alert buttons at sixteen schools. That is roughly $56,000 a school. State rules under HB24 and HB40 are driving it.

What do the published cost guides get wrong?

They publish ranges without records, and the widest ranges come from the companies selling the systems.

Avigilon’s school security guide gives one price: “$5,000 to over $500,000 per campus.” Its own FAQ repeats that range as the answer to “How much does a school security system cost?” A hundredfold range is not a price. It cannot tell a district whether a quote is fair. It cannot tell a vendor where to bid. Avigilon is owned by Motorola Solutions.

Volt.ai’s school security cost page is the one page ranking on cost intent. It carries 14 dollar figures. Two things about it are checkable. First, not one of the 14 carries a source, footnote or link. Second, its model compares a “standalone” system against an “integrated” one. Integrated is the category Volt.ai sells. Add up its own columns and standalone comes to $98,000 to $290,000. Integrated comes to $3,000 to $31,000. The savings claims rest on quotes from two administrators. One is at Robinson Independent School District in Texas. The other is a principal at Prescott High School in Arizona.

The issue is the sourcing gap, not the companies. A number with no record behind it cannot be checked by the person spending the money.

Our method, briefly. Every figure here comes from a board agenda, adopted budget or purchase order recorded by Civic IQ. The window is January 1 to September 5, 2026. A record counts when a K-12 district approved a security purchase with a stated dollar amount. We cut quotes, unselected alternates, repair and monitoring invoices, anything under $1,000, and packages that mixed security with unrelated work.

Who is winning K-12 security contracts?

ZeroEyes won the most K-12 security awards of any vendor in the records, at 19 across 2025 and 2026. The table counts awards where the vendor is the contracting party.

Civic IQ records, 2025 to 2026. Vendors with at least six awards are shown. Counting the contracting party understates platform reach. Much of this is bought through integrators.

Incumbents and where they are strongest

Count by platform named in the record, not by contracting party, and the order changes. Avigilon appears in 25 records worth $29.0 million. That is the largest installed footprint by value. Verkada appears in 30 records worth $7.8 million, the most records of any platform. The gap is the story. Avigilon holds the big legacy deployments. Verkada wins more deals, smaller and newer. Districts often buy Verkada through a local integrator. That is why Tessera Technology Group and Byte Speed appear as the contracting party on Verkada work.

AI weapon detection, the fastest-moving category

This is the only category where the software vendor usually contracts straight with the district. ZeroEyes has the most awards, at the smaller median of $68,400. Omnilert has fewer awards at a much larger median of $162,330, because it lands district-wide deals. Baltimore County Public Schools budgeted $560,000 a year and spent $399,440 in FY2026. Both firms sell software that runs on cameras the district already owns. That is why this category grows with no hardware refresh.

Where incumbents are being displaced

Displacement is happening at the software layer, not the camera layer. One New Jersey district awarded a multi-year contract to add Omnilert detection to its existing Avigilon cameras. Year one cost $117,720. Years two and three cost $49,852 each. The cameras stayed. The smart layer was bought from someone else. Watch that pattern. It means the incumbent hardware vendor can keep the install and still lose the growth.

How do districts pay for school security systems?

Four routes, and the one a district uses tells you its timeline.

State school safety grants

The most common named source in the records. Pocahontas in Iowa replaced every interior door lock at a junior high on a $136,309 state safety grant allocation. Maryland’s Center for School Safety awarded one district $199,941 for access control, cameras, communications and vape detection. Grant money is use-it-or-lose-it, so these move fast once awarded.

State mandates

A mandate is not a grant, and it is a stronger buying signal. Weber School District in Utah is installing panic alert buttons at sixteen schools specifically to meet HB24 and HB40. When a state sets a deadline, the district buys whether or not it wanted to.

Bond and capital funds

This is where the large awards sit. Belton ISD in Texas funded a $635,273 camera refresh from 2022 bond funds. Troy School District in Michigan funded its $1,826,553 paging and intercom system from a 2023 capital projects fund. Bond-funded work is slow to start and hard to stop, and the money was voted years before you hear about it.

Cooperative contracts

Districts buy security through co-ops constantly. Belton ISD used TIPS. Edison Township used an HCESC contract for its $345,822 access control award. A co-op removes the solicitation step entirely, so if you hold the right co-op contract you can be bought without a bid. Our guide to cooperative purchasing explains how the vehicles work.

What does a fair quote look like?

Check a quote against four unit benchmarks, all drawn from 2026 awards.

A worked example. A district with four buildings wants cameras refreshed and 20 doors on access control. At 40 cameras a building, 160 cameras at $1,900 is about $304,000. Twenty doors at $6,500 is $130,000. That totals roughly $434,000, which lands above the 75th percentile of $181,332, as a four-building project should. If a quote for that scope came in at $54,498, the median, something is missing from it.

Two cautions. Per-camera prices in these records usually include multi-year cloud licensing, so a cheaper quote may simply have a shorter license term. And retrofit costs more than new construction, because the cabling is the expensive part.

Which school security bids are open right now?

Benchmarks are more useful next to a live solicitation. These four were open on September 5, 2026. Status changes daily.

• Forsyth County Schools AI Safety Analytics and Weapon Detection RFP 2026, Forsyth County School District, GA. Due September 11, 2026.
• Detroit Public Schools Community District Bid 26-0143, Detroit Public Schools Community District, MI. Due December 31, 2026.
• Birmingham City Schools Ramsay High School Auditorium A/V Package ITB #2026-10, Birmingham City School District, AL. Due September 10, 2026.
• City of Methuen School Bus Stop Arm Monitoring and Enforcement Program RFP 2026, City of Methuen, MA. Due September 14, 2026.

The list worth more is the one nobody prints. It is the district security contracts up for renewal in your state in the next twelve months. Ask Civic IQ for the school security contracts expiring in your state →

Frequently asked questions

How much does a school security system cost?

The median was $54,498, across 82 K-12 security awards recorded in 2026. Half of all awards fell between $15,947 and $181,332. A single-building camera or door job usually lands under $50,000. A district-wide intercom or paging job runs into the high six figures. The largest award in the set was $1,826,553.

What is the cheapest way to secure a school building?

Add software to cameras you already own. Districts in the 2026 records paid a median of $14,664 for visitor management. That is the lowest of any category. Putting AI gun detection on existing cameras also avoids new hardware. Eunice Public Schools in New Mexico bought 200 added ZeroEyes licenses for $97,000. That is $485 per camera stream, and no cameras were replaced.

How much does school access control cost per door?

About $6,500 a door. Access control awards had a median of $46,278 in the 2026 records. The clearest per-door figure is Southern Lehigh Valley Middle School in Pennsylvania. It was priced at $71,500 for 11 doors in January 2026. That price covers controllers, readers, electrified locks, cabling and programming. A retrofit costs more than wiring a new building.

Do AI gun detection systems actually work?

The contract record shows districts buying them and renewing them. That measures satisfaction, not detection accuracy. No vendor in this category publishes independent accuracy testing. Baltimore County Public Schools budgeted $560,000 a year for Omnilert monitoring and spent $399,440 in FY2026. Treat any accuracy claim with no third-party test behind it as a marketing position.

What grants pay for school security systems?

State school safety grant programs are the most common source in the records. Districts also used bond funds, capital project funds and, in Alabama, ATF funding. Birmingham City Schools bought 14 OpenGate weapon detection units for $300,118 that way. Utah districts are buying panic alert systems to meet state rules under HB24 and HB40. That is a mandate, not a grant.

How long does a school security system deployment take?

The records show multi-school projects scoped across a school year, or across one summer. Weber School District in Utah expected to finish panic alert buttons at sixteen schools by summer 2026. Single-building camera or door jobs get approved and installed inside one budget cycle. A cooperative contract shortens the buying step, not the build.

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Method and sources

Figures come from Civic IQ contract records. They cover January 1 to September 5, 2026, unless another year is named. The 2026 set is 82 awards across 28 states. Where a category is thin, the record count is shown so you can weigh it. A wider 2025 to 2026 set of 260 awards across 40 states gives a median of $57,966. That is close to the 2026 figure of $54,498, so the 2026 sample looks normal.

A record counts when a K-12 district approved a security purchase with a stated dollar amount. Scope had to be access control, cameras, weapon detection, visitor management or emergency notification. We cut quotes and proposals not yet acted on. We cut alternates that were not selected. We cut repair and monitoring invoices, and anything under $1,000. We also cut capital packages that mixed security with unrelated work.

What this data does not contain. Enrollment and building counts are not in the contract records. So we do not report cost per student or cost per building. Where a per-unit figure appears above, the unit count came from the award text itself. We estimated none of them.

Two statistics often quoted in this category were checked and dropped. One widely cited adoption figure covers 2009-10 to 2019-20. The 2021-22 release used above supersedes it. Crime and survey figures used elsewhere could not be traced to a primary source in the form they are usually quoted. So we do not repeat them.

1. Civic IQ contract records, K-12 school security awards, January 1 to September 5, 2026.
2. National Center for Education Statistics, Condition of Education, school safety and security measures, 2021-22, last updated July 2024. nces.ed.gov
3. Avigilon, “School security systems” guide, accessed September 5, 2026. avigilon.com
4. Volt.ai, “School Security System Costs,” accessed September 5, 2026. volt.ai

Related reading: how to sell to school districts, our K-12 cybersecurity vendor and pricing analysis for the other half of the district technology budget, and what districts pay for Yondr phone pouches, the other line item boards are voting on this year.