Every builder who rings us about site camera hire price opens with the same question, and it is a fair one: what am I actually up for per week? Here is the straight answer before anything else. A camera mounted on a power pole is $9.86 a day excluding GST, which is about $69 a week. A standalone camera pole, where the site has no pole to mount on, is $14.29 a day, or about $100 a week. Both run on a 12 week minimum hire and delivery is $390 excluding GST. Everything else on this page explains what sits behind those two figures and what to check before you put them next to somebody else's quote. If you want the full picture of what we hire, start with construction site security camera hire.
What drives the price of construction site security camera hire?
Six things move a site camera quote: how many cameras it takes to cover the boundary, how much area each one has to watch, how the camera gets power, how it connects, how long the hire runs, and whether you want recording only or someone actively watching the feed. Camera count and power source are the two that move the number most.
Take those one at a time, because this is where two quotes that look different usually turn out to be quoting different things.
Camera count is set by sightlines, not by block size. A rectangular residential lot with one gate often needs a single unit. An open civil site with three access points and a material compound needs three or four, and no supplier can tell you which without the address.
Power decides the hardware. If your temporary power pole hire is already in and energised, the camera can run on mains from the pole, and that is the cheaper arrangement at about $69 a week. If the site has nothing, you need a self contained unit with its own pole, panel and battery, which is the $100 a week option.
Connectivity on a live build is almost always 4G, because a fresh site has no internet. That is included in our rate.
Hire duration matters because the delivery, install and removal costs are fixed and get spread across the period. A 12 week hire absorbs them better than a short one.
Monitoring versus recording is the biggest single swing in this market and the one most often left ambiguous in a quote.
How much should I pay for CCTV installation?
On a hire, nothing. Installation is inside the weekly rate: the crew delivers the camera, mounts it, commissions it, checks the mobile signal at that address, and returns to remove it at the end of hire. Neither trip is billed separately afterwards. The only separate line is delivery, at $390 excluding GST for the standard zone.
This is the single most common reason a hire quote and a purchase quote are not comparable. When you buy a system, installation is a contractor's labour bill on hardware you already own, and it is a real and separate cost. When you hire, it is absorbed.
If a hire supplier quotes you a weekly rate and then adds an installation fee on top, that is worth questioning. Ask what the fee covers that the rate does not.
How much do CCTV installers charge?
An installer charges labour to fit hardware you have bought. A hire company charges a periodic rate and carries the hardware, the SIM, the data, the storage and every failure for the life of the build. Those are two different commercial arrangements and comparing their headline numbers directly will mislead you.
The practical way to compare is to work out the total cost of each over the actual length of your build. On the purchase side that means hardware, installer labour, a data plan, storage, and the replacement cost when a unit gets knocked off a post by a bobcat. On the hire side it is the weekly rate multiplied by the weeks, plus delivery once.
For a build measured in months, hire generally wins. For a yard or depot you will still own in five years, buying generally wins. The awkward middle sits around a year, and it usually turns on whether you want to be the person responsible for a failed unit at two in the morning.
How much does a good CCTV system cost?
"Good" on a construction site means fit for the site, not highest specification. A camera correctly placed at $69 a week will out-perform a higher resolution unit pointed at the wrong part of the block. What makes a system good is coverage of the things that actually get stolen, a connection that holds up at that address, and someone who replaces the unit when it fails.
The failure we see most often is not resolution. It is a camera mounted too low, aimed too wide, or pointed into the western sun so every afternoon frame is a silhouette. That costs nothing to get right at install and cannot be fixed later without another trip.
So when you are comparing quotes, spend less time on the spec sheet and more on asking where each supplier intends to mount the unit and why.
What is included in a jobsite security camera rental cost?
The rate covers the camera, the weatherproof housing, the mount, the mobile data connection, footage storage, phone app access, and a swap out if the unit fails. Delivery and install trips are inside the rate. What is quoted separately is the $390 delivery charge and any pole hired alongside the camera.
What is not included, here or anywhere in this market by default, is live human monitoring. That is a separate product at a materially higher price, and the word "monitored" gets used loosely enough that it is worth pinning down in writing.
Footage retention is the other thing to confirm. If you need to hand something to police a fortnight after a theft, a short retention window is no use to you.
What makes one quote higher than another?
Two site camera quotes for the same block can differ by a wide margin without either being wrong. The usual causes are monitoring, retention window, the number of cameras each supplier thinks the site needs, relocations during the build, and whether install and removal are inside the rate or billed on top.
Sort those five out and the comparison becomes straightforward. Leave them ambiguous and you are comparing a recording camera against a monitored one and concluding that one supplier is expensive.
Damage and loss liability is worth reading properly too. Fair wear and tear during a hire is our problem. A unit destroyed by machinery or stolen from site sits with the hirer under the hire terms, and that is standard across the industry rather than unusual, but you should know it before you sign rather than after.
Cameras, guards and the temporary power pole: how the site changes the number
A guard is priced per hour and a camera is priced per period, so on most South East Queensland builds the camera is a fraction of the cost. Power availability is the other site factor that moves the number, because a site with an energised pole takes the $69 a week mains camera while a bare block takes the $100 a week self contained unit.
We have written the guards comparison up properly elsewhere, so rather than re-argue it here, read cameras versus security guards cost for the detail. The short version is that cameras are the standing deterrent and a guard is for specific high risk windows.
The power point is worth planning around. If you are hiring a pole from us anyway, say so when you ask for the camera quote, because mounting the camera on the pole you already have is the cheaper of the two arrangements and it goes up the day the pole does. We deliver across Brisbane and surrounding SEQ from our Capalaba depot, and have been family run since 1960.
What to ask before you accept a site camera hire quote
Five questions, and they take about two minutes on the phone:
- Is install and removal inside the weekly rate, or billed separately?
- What is the minimum hire period, in weeks?
- Is this recording with alerts, or actively monitored by a person?
- How many days of footage are retained before it is overwritten?
- What is the delivery charge to my exact address, as its own number?
Any supplier who will not answer those in writing is not one to compare on price. Our figures are all published on our hire prices page so you can check ours against anyone else's before you ring.
Send us the site address and how long the build runs, and we will price the camera setup that actually suits it, including the delivery figure so there are no surprises later.
Related Service
Construction Site Security Cameras
4G solar-powered security cameras for construction site surveillance.
