Why there is no honest price list
Two offices with the same floor area can differ enormously in what a CCTV installation costs, and almost none of the difference is the cameras. It is the building: what the ceilings are made of, how cable gets from A to B, what the building manager requires, and what happens to the footage once it is recorded. A published price ignores all of that, which is why published prices come with asterisks.
Below are the drivers, roughly in the order they matter.
Driver 1 — Camera count and placement
The count drives everything downstream: cabling runs, switch ports, recorder capacity, licensing. But the count should come from coverage, not budget — start with what you actually need footage of. For most offices that means entries and exits, reception, the server or comms room, storage areas, and anywhere cash or stock lives. Interior general coverage beyond that is often wanted less than people assume once they see the entry points covered properly.
Placement matters as much as count. A camera in the wrong spot — backlit by a window, too high to identify a face, covering a corridor nobody cares about — costs the same to install as one placed well. This is why the walkthrough before quoting matters more than the brochure after it.
Driver 2 — Cabling and ceiling access
Every camera needs a cable run back to the comms room, and the cost of each run is set by what is in the way. Accessible ceiling tiles are the easy case. Set plasterboard ceilings, exposed-ceiling designs where cabling must be dressed neatly in view, full ceiling voids shared with other services, or runs that cross fire-rated walls all add labour — sometimes more labour than the easy case by a wide margin.
This is the driver quotes most often disagree on silently. One contractor assumed lift-and-lay tiles; another walked the floor and saw plasterboard. Their numbers differ and neither looks wrong until the assumptions are written down.
Driver 3 — Building rules and after-hours work
CBD towers have rules: contractor inductions, permits for ceiling access, restrictions on noisy or disruptive work during business hours, booking freight lifts. If drilling and ceiling work must happen after hours, the same installation takes the same hours at a higher labour rate — plus the admin of scheduling around the building. None of this is optional, and a quote that ignores it is a quote that will grow.
Driver 4 — The recording platform
Where footage goes shapes both the upfront and ongoing cost. An on-site recorder (NVR) is mostly an upfront hardware cost, sized by camera count and how long you keep footage. Cloud video platforms shift the cost into ongoing subscriptions and lean on your internet connection instead of a local box. Hybrid setups exist. Retention is the quiet multiplier in all of them: keeping footage for longer means more storage, wherever that storage lives.
Neither model is inherently better. The trap is comparing an upfront-heavy quote against a subscription-heavy one as if they were the same shape. Compare them over the term of your lease, not at the bottom line of page one.
Driver 5 — Monitoring and who watches it
A camera system nobody looks at is a footage archive, which may be all you need — most office CCTV is reviewed after an incident, not watched live. But if you want events acted on — alarms verified against footage, after-hours activity checked, a control room notified — that is a monitoring service, and it is an ongoing cost separate from the installation. Decide which you are buying before you compare quotes, because a quote with monitoring and one without are quoting different products.
How to read a CCTV quote
- Ask for itemisation. Cameras (count and model), cabling, the recorder or platform, licensing, labour, and testing — each as its own line. A lump sum is not a scope; it is a number wearing one.
- Look for the assumptions. Ceiling type, working hours, who arranges building access. If they are not stated, they are not priced — and unpriced assumptions come back as variations.
- Check what happens after handover. Warranty terms, ongoing licensing, and whether documentation and test results are included or extra.
- Compare scope before price. Make the quotes describe the same system first. Only then does the cheaper one mean anything.
- Be suspicious of the outlier. A quote far below the others has usually left something out. You will meet that something later, priced as a variation.
We quote itemised as a matter of policy — not out of virtue, but because it is the only format that lets a client compare fairly and hold anyone, including us, to the scope.