“Our original goal was 10 percent year over year,” Mayor Paul Young said a few days ago, talking about Memphis’s violent crime reduction. What the city got was 28 percent.
Today is January 1, 2026, and for the first time in six years, Memphis enters a new year with fewer than 200 murders on the books from the year before. The final count for 2025 came in at 184 criminal homicides, down from 249 in 2024. Violent crime overall dropped roughly 28 percent. By the raw numbers, it was the best year Memphis has had since 2019.
That is the backdrop. The question facing the security industry right now is simpler and harder: what does any of it mean for the companies, guards, property managers, and business owners who make security decisions in this city every day?
This is our annual New Year’s outlook. Last year at this time, we predicted that the private security market in Memphis would grow by 8 to 12 percent in 2025. It did. We didn’t predict the National Guard arriving on city streets. Nobody did.
The Guard Factor
The Memphis Safe Task Force launched in late September 2025 after President Trump announced the operation on September 12. By late December, the task force involved up to 1,000 Tennessee National Guard troops, 13 federal agencies, and MPD. The Department of Defense has authorized and funded Guard operations through September 2026.
For private security companies, the task force created something unusual: a direct, visible competitor in the law enforcement space that is simultaneously driving demand for their services.
That sounds contradictory. Here’s how it plays out.
A property manager in Whitehaven sees National Guard Humvees rolling past her apartment complex three times a day. Does she cancel her security contract? No. She calls her provider and asks for more coverage, because the Guard’s presence tells her that her neighborhood is one of the places the federal government considers dangerous enough to send soldiers. She doesn’t feel reassured by the troops. She feels validated in her concern.
I’ve talked to four security company owners in Memphis over the past two weeks. Every one of them said December was their busiest month for new client inquiries in at least three years. The task force didn’t reduce demand for private security. It amplified it.
The catch is that the Guard won’t stay forever. September 2026 is the current authorization window. If the task force winds down on schedule, Memphis loses a layer of visible deterrence that the city did not pay for and cannot replace. MPD doesn’t have the headcount. The Shelby County Sheriff’s Office doesn’t either. Private security is the only sector positioned to absorb some of that gap, and companies that prepare for it now will be the ones that benefit when the contracts come.
Demand vs. Supply: The Same Problem, Getting Worse
Memphis’s security staffing shortage didn’t start in 2025 and it won’t end in 2026. The math hasn’t changed enough.
Tennessee processes roughly 4,200 individual guard registrations per year through TDCI, a number that’s held steady since 2021. Demand for guards in Shelby County alone has grown by an estimated 15 to 20 percent over the same period. The training requirement (four hours for unarmed, an additional 12 for armed) is not the barrier. The background check delay is. There is no provisional work status in Tennessee; a guard cannot work a single shift until their TDCI registration clears, and that takes two to six weeks depending on processing volume.
For armed guards, the pipeline is even tighter. The 12-hour firearms training course, including live-fire qualification at 70 percent on a TDCI-approved silhouette course, filters out roughly a third of first-time applicants. Companies that need armed personnel for distribution centers, healthcare campuses, and government facilities are competing for a pool of qualified candidates that isn’t growing fast enough.
Entry-level pay reflects the shortage. Unarmed guards in Memphis are now earning $15 to $18 per hour, up from $12 to $14 three years ago. Armed guards are pulling $20 to $25, with premium sites like FedEx’s World Hub or the St. Jude campus paying at the high end. These wages are good for workers. They compress margins for security companies, especially smaller firms bidding against Allied Universal and GardaWorld on price.
The Companies to Watch
The Memphis security market is layered. National firms control the large-scale contracts. Legacy local companies hold relationships that go back decades. And a middle tier of regional operators is growing faster than either.
Allied Universal remains the largest security employer in the metro area by headcount. Their footprint covers corporate offices, healthcare, and retail, and they absorbed much of G4S’s Memphis portfolio after the 2021 acquisition. GardaWorld, the Canadian-owned firm that tried to acquire Allied Universal in 2019 before backing off, maintains a strong Memphis presence focused on transportation, logistics, and distribution.
On the local side, Phelps Security continues to be the name that comes up first when Memphis business owners talk about quality. They’ve been operating from Park Avenue since the 1950s. Their reputation is premium service at premium pricing, and they’ve built their client base through relationships that span generations of family-owned businesses. Imperial Security, headquartered on Poplar Avenue since 1968, controls a big share of the transportation and logistics security market, which makes sense given Memphis’s role as a freight hub.
The regional tier is where 2026 could get interesting. Companies like Shield of Steel, the veteran-owned firm operating statewide out of their Lamar Avenue location, and Walden Security out of Chattanooga have been picking up contracts that the national companies consider too small and the legacy locals consider outside their territory. Walden has been expanding into West Tennessee aggressively, and Shield of Steel has carved out a niche in the mid-market by undercutting the nationals on price while providing armed, GPS-tracked patrols that the smaller locals can’t match.
For business owners evaluating providers in 2026, the market gives you more options than it did five years ago. It also requires more scrutiny. Not every company billing itself as “full service” can actually deliver armed officers on short notice, and the staffing shortage means some providers are stretching their personnel thinner than their contracts promise.
Three Trends That Will Shape 2026
Technology adoption will accelerate. MPD’s Real Time Crime Center became fully operational in 2024 and has already changed how the department allocates patrol resources. The private sector is following, though more slowly. Security companies that invest in GPS tracking, mobile patrol apps, and camera analytics will win contracts over companies that still run paper-based guard tour systems. The technology isn’t expensive. The resistance to adopting it is cultural, especially among older firms that have done business the same way for 30 years.
Insurance pressure will keep security spending high. Underwriters in Shelby County have not reduced commercial property premiums in response to the 2025 crime decline. That’s standard industry behavior; it takes two to three consecutive years of declining loss ratios before insurers adjust. For property owners and facility managers, this means the financial incentive to maintain or increase security spending remains strong even as crime drops. A building owner paying $80,000 a year in insurance premiums and $50,000 for security isn’t going to cut the security budget until the premiums come down. The premiums won’t come down until 2027 at the earliest.
Regulatory scrutiny will increase. Dallas’s Law, passed in 2023, gave TDCI the power to suspend (not just fine) company licenses for deploying unregistered guards. The board has been using that authority more aggressively in the past year, and 2026 will likely see more enforcement actions, especially against companies that entered the market quickly to chase demand and cut corners on compliance. For established, licensed operators, this is good news. A rising enforcement tide washes out the unlicensed competition.
The Risk Nobody’s Pricing In
Here’s what concerns me heading into 2026. The entire market, from the crime statistics to the staffing forecasts to the contract pipeline, is being shaped by a temporary condition: the Memphis Safe Task Force. The Guard is here. Federal agents are here. The arrests are happening at a pace Memphis has never seen.
When the authorization expires in September, one of two things happens. Either the program gets extended, in which case the current dynamic continues. Or it doesn’t, in which case Memphis goes back to relying on MPD (still understaffed), local law enforcement partnerships (still underfunded), and the private security companies that have been filling the gaps for years.
I’m not predicting a crime spike. MPD’s “Sustain the Gain” strategy for 2026, announced in late December, suggests the department is planning for a post-task force reality. The Real Time Crime Center provides intelligence capabilities that didn’t exist five years ago. The Crime Prevention Grant program, which opens its portal on January 25, will fund community-based interventions that complement policing.
What I am predicting is that the security industry in Memphis will grow in 2026 regardless of what happens with crime statistics. If crime stays down, businesses invest in security to protect the gains. If crime rebounds, they invest because they have to. The direction of the market is up. The question is by how much.
Last year we projected 8 to 12 percent growth. For 2026, I’m putting the number at 10 to 15 percent, driven by the staffing shortage (which pushes prices up), technology investment, and the post-task force uncertainty that will keep security at the top of every property manager’s budget.
The Guard will leave eventually. The question is whether Memphis has built anything that lasts.