The Security Industry Authority (SIA) published its Annual Report and Accounts 2025-26 on Thursday 5 November. It is the regulator's own record of the licensed workforce that close protection and other security firms recruit from, and it carries one cost change for businesses in the voluntary Approved Contractor Scheme (ACS).
What the report says
On licensing, the report says: "we ended the year with 514,333 active licences and 455,001 licence holders on our public register." The SIA received "more than 155,000 paid individual licence applications in 2025-26, which was 45,000 fewer applications than in 2024-25." It says it anticipated the fall, mainly because 2025-26 was the third year of its three-year licensing cycle, when volumes are typically lower. It adds that changes to UK visa policy contributed to lower-than-forecast volumes, with 18% fewer first-time applicants from the EEA and 28% fewer from the rest of the world than in 2024-25.
On approved contractors, the report says: "As at July 2026 there were 714 approved contractors on the register, who together employ over 151,000 SIA licensed staff." By size, 149 companies have up to 10 licensable staff, 164 have 11 to 25, 328 have 26 to 250 and 73 have over 250.
On fees, the SIA says its review found individual fees could stay at the current statutory level, although "due to the end of the previous £20 rebate scheme, this meant a £20 increase at the point of payment." It also says it "needed to increase the annual registration fees for businesses within the voluntary Approved Contractor Scheme (from £15 to £25 per licensable individual deployed) to ensure full cost recovery."
On close protection, the report says the SIA announced in August 2025 mandatory refresher training for close protection operatives to renew licences from 1 April 2026, and that the new refresher qualification was available from awarding organisations from 1 October 2025.
What the report does not say
The report gives no date on which the ACS fee increase takes effect. It says the licence rebate scheme, whose end produced the £20 increase at the point of payment, ended on 31 March 2026. Close protection is listed as one of the regulated activities, but we found no count of close protection licence holders in the figures we read, so nothing here sizes that sector. We read the report as a text extraction of the PDF on 7 November and located each figure by string search against it.
What it means for security firms
This is The Ops Con's reading, not the SIA's.
For firms in the ACS, the fee change is a cost to model per licensable individual deployed. A firm with 100 licensable staff would see the annual registration fee line go from £1,500 to £2,500 on the report's per-person figures, if the new rate applied to all of them for a full year; the report does not say that it does, so check the date with the SIA before budgeting. For close protection operatives and the firms that hire them, the refresher requirement applies to licence renewals from 1 April 2026 and is worth checking against each team's renewal dates. The wider numbers show a large licensed pool, but the report does not break it down by sector, so it says little about close protection supply on its own.
