Guard shacks for sale with delivered pricing by size, glazing level and utility package. Prefab booths shipped nationwide.
A guard booth is the most specification-sensitive small building there is. Two booths with the same footprint can differ by fifty thousand dollars, and the difference is almost entirely glazing, envelope and utilities — not size.
That is why "how much is a guard shack" has no useful answer without four decisions: how many officers occupy it, whether it needs a restroom, what the glazing has to stop, and whether it stays in one place or relocates. This page publishes pricing against all four.
Standard footprints, delivered and set on a prepared pad.
| Footprint | Area | Occupancy | Base price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4x6 | 24 sq ft | 1 officer, standing or stool | $18,900 |
| 5x7 | 35 sq ft | 1 officer seated with desk | $24,600 |
| 6x8 | 48 sq ft | 1-2 officers, small desk and locker | $31,400 |
| 8x10 | 80 sq ft | 2 officers, full desk, restroom option | $46,200 |
| 8x12 | 96 sq ft | 2-3 officers, desk plus restroom | $54,800 |
| 10x16 | 160 sq ft | 3-4 officers, break area and restroom | $78,500 |
| 10x20 | 200 sq ft | Shift room with restroom and lockers | $94,300 |
Base price covers the shell, tempered glazing, HVAC, lighting, receptacles and a single entry door. Foundation, utility runs, ballistic upgrades and gate integration are separate line items.
Access control and delivery check-in on active jobsites. Skid-mounted so the booth relocates as the site phases change.
Resident and visitor screening with a call box and gate controller. Usually the most finish-sensitive application since it faces homeowners daily.
Truck scale integration, hazmat manifest checks and contractor badging. Frequently needs a restroom because posts run 12-hour shifts.
Ticket and payment handling with a pass-through window. Compact footprints dominate because lane space is tight.
Mantrap sequencing, badge readers and camera integration. Ballistic glazing is common at this tier.
Container seal verification and driver check-in, often in high-wind coastal exposure requiring upgraded anchoring.
Forced-entry and ballistic resistance to a specified UL 752 level, with blast standoff considerations.
Unmanned monitoring post or manned during outage response, typically with backup power provisions.
Single point of entry screening, increasingly specified with Level 3 glazing.
Temporary credential checking that must deploy and strike quickly, so trailer-mounted is preferred over skid.
Used guard booths do trade, and for a low-security application on a short-duration project they can make sense. Three things to check before you buy one.
The glazing history. Polycarbonate yellows and crazes with ultraviolet exposure, and a booth that has sat in full sun for eight years may have glazing that is optically poor and structurally degraded even though it looks intact. Acrylic-polycarbonate laminates delaminate at the edges. If the booth was ever specified as bullet resistant, understand that a ballistic rating is a property of an undamaged assembly — a previously struck or weather-degraded panel is no longer rated, and there is no field test that restores the certification.
The floor and the skid. Guard booths sit outdoors, and water finds the floor penetrations around conduit and drain lines. Corrosion at the skid-to-floor connection is the most common structural defect and the most expensive to correct because it requires lifting the building off the skid.
The mechanical unit. A through-wall HVAC unit in a continuously occupied glass box works extremely hard. Ten-year-old equipment in this service is generally at end of life, and replacement is straightforward but should be priced into the purchase rather than discovered in July.
The case for new is mostly about specification fit. A used booth is whatever size, glazing level and utility configuration someone else needed. Because booth pricing scales with specification rather than square footage, a new unit built to your actual requirement frequently costs less than a used unit plus the modifications required to make it work.
The set itself is the easy part. What determines whether it goes smoothly is what happened in the two weeks before the truck arrived.
The pad has to be cured, level and correctly dimensioned. Module manufacturers work to tighter tolerances than most concrete crews assume — a pad that is an inch out of level across the diagonal will telegraph into door and window operation. Confirm the tolerance requirement in writing and have the pad surveyed before the delivery date, not on it.
Conduit and drain stubs must be in the right place. They get cast into the pad, and moving them afterward means breaking concrete. This is the single most common cause of a delivery that arrives and cannot be connected.
The path from the street has to be walked. Overhead lines, gate widths, turning radii for a lowboy, soft ground after rain, and parked vehicles all stop a delivery cold. Booths under twelve feet wide ship without permit escort, which keeps freight simple, but they still need a physical path.
Someone has to be there with authority. The set takes a few hours and generates decisions — exact orientation, which side the door faces, where the HVAC condensate drains. A delivery attended by someone who cannot make those calls turns into a return trip.
Once set, the remaining work is electrical tie-in, plumbing connection if the booth has a restroom, access control integration, and inspection. On a straightforward site that is two to four days.
| Line item | Cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Concrete pad | $4,200–9,800 | Depends on footprint, frost depth and whether the pad carries a gate arm foundation. |
| Electrical trenching | $185 per linear foot | Past the first 50 ft from the nearest service point. |
| Water and sewer | $6,400–18,200 | Only if the booth has a restroom. This is frequently the single largest line item on a small booth. |
| Freight | $6.80 per loaded mile | From the fabrication facility. Booths under 12 ft wide ship without permit escort. |
| Set | $1,800–8,600 | Forklift set at the low end, crane at the high end when the pad is beyond truck reach. |
| Gate and access integration | $3,900–24,500 | Badge reader, barrier arm, loop detectors and camera tie-in. |
Slot-based, not a fixed promise.
A factory runs a queue. When you reserve a slot you are buying a position in that queue, and the honest answer to "how fast" depends on three things: how many slots are already committed, the lead time on the specific materials your configuration calls for, and whether your permit clears before your slot opens.
Current windows run 30 to 90 days from released engineering to delivery for standard configurations. Smaller units with Essential finishes sit at the fast end. Anything with a ballistic package, a hurricane-rated envelope, custom glazing or a second story sits at the slow end because those components have their own supply lead times.
The reason this beats a site-built schedule is not that the factory works faster on any given day. It is that permitting and fabrication run in parallel instead of in sequence, and the on-site set is measured in hours rather than months. Weather stops a framing crew; it does not stop a production line.
Windows move with demand and material availability. A slot quoted today holds while capacity lasts.
Tell us the scope and the ZIP. You get a real delivered-and-installed number, not a "contact us for pricing" runaround.
We run a group of focused sites so you land on the one that matches what you actually need instead of a catch-all catalog.