Home alarm monitoring
What monitoring adds to a house alarm, what police response requires, and what it costs.
Alarm monitoring quotes for UK homes and businesses
Get matched with alarm monitoring companies covering your area, free and with no obligation — and understand exactly how police response works before you spend a penny.
We match you with providers rather than selling you a system — we are not an installer or a monitoring centre. See how it works.
Start with what you actually need
Business alarm monitoring
Open and close reporting, dual-path signalling, insurer conditions and contracted response.
What it costs
Indicative UK market ranges by response level, and the charges that quotes often leave out.
Check a provider is approved
A one-minute check on the NSI and SSAIB registers that eliminates bad candidates.
The four response levels
Nearly every decision in this category comes down to choosing one of these. The differences are larger than the marketing suggests.
| Level | What happens on activation | Police attend? | Typical cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bells-only | Siren sounds locally. Nobody is notified. | No | No ongoing fee |
| Self-monitored | Alert to your phone. You decide and act. | No | Hardware only |
| Monitored, keyholder response | ARC calls you, then keyholders or a response company attends. | No | £25–£70 a month |
| Monitored, police response | ARC calls you; confirmed activations passed to police. | Yes, if confirmed | £20–£40 a month |
Cost figures are indicative UK market ranges reviewed 2026-08, not quotes. See what it costs for what sits behind them.
Questions people ask before buying
Will the police respond to my burglar alarm?
Only if your alarm is professionally monitored and the property holds a valid Unique Reference Number (URN) issued by your local police force. The police do not respond to bells-only alarms, to self-monitored app alerts, or to systems without a URN — in those cases you are reporting a suspected crime yourself, like any other member of the public.
Police response to alarms in England and Wales runs under national policy set by the National Police Chiefs' Council, applied locally by each force. Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own equivalent arrangements.
The conditions are consistent in outline. The system must be installed and maintained by a company certificated by an approved inspectorate — in practice the NSI or SSAIB. It must be monitored by a certificated ARC. And the force must have issued a URN for that specific address.
Without a URN there is no police response to the alarm itself. That does not leave you helpless: if you have evidence of a crime in progress you can call the police directly, and they will respond on the basis of that report. But the alarm activation alone will not generate an attendance.
This is the single most misunderstood point in the category, and it is worth being blunt about it: buying a camera-based DIY system with an app does not get you police response, whatever the marketing implies.
How much does alarm monitoring cost in the UK?
Typical UK alarm monitoring runs from roughly £12 to £25 a month for digital monitoring, £20 to £40 with police response, and £25 to £70 where keyholder attendance is included. Remote CCTV monitoring costs more and varies widely with camera count and hours. These are indicative market ranges, not quotes — your actual price depends on the system, the risk and the response level.
The variables that move the price are the response level, the signalling configuration, the number of zones or cameras, whether the communicator is bought or rented, and the contract length.
There are also costs that are not the monitoring fee, and they are the ones that surprise people. Police URN issue and annual maintenance fees are set by each force and charged to you. A signalling device supply and install is typically a few hundred pounds one-off. Alarm maintenance — required if you want to keep police response — is usually a separate annual charge.
Ask for a written breakdown that separates monitoring, maintenance, police fees, hardware and any early-termination terms. Two quotes with the same monthly figure can differ substantially once those are visible.
Because we match you with providers rather than selling monitoring ourselves, we set none of these prices. The ranges above exist so you can tell at a glance whether a quote is normal, and they are reviewed periodically rather than continuously.
Is a monitored alarm better than a bells-only alarm?
A monitored alarm produces a response when nobody is there to hear the siren, which is the situation most burglaries happen in — so for an empty property, monitoring is the meaningful upgrade. A bells-only alarm is cheaper, has no ongoing fee, and still deters, but nothing follows the noise.
The honest comparison is about what happens after activation. Both types make a noise and both deter opportunists. Only one of them results in a phone call or an attendance.
Bells-only makes sense if the property is rarely empty, if neighbours are close and reliable, or if the budget genuinely does not stretch to a monthly fee. It is much better than no alarm.
Monitoring makes sense if the property is regularly empty, if it is isolated enough that a siren goes unheard, if it holds high-value contents, or if an insurer requires it. It is also the only route to police attendance: no UK police force responds to a bells-only alarm as an alarm activation.
Note that monitoring is not a substitute for the basics. A monitored alarm on a house with an insecure back door is still a house with an insecure back door.
What happened to BT Redcare, and what replaced it?
BT closed its Redcare alarm signalling service in 2025, after announcing its withdrawal in 2023. Systems that used Redcare had to be migrated to an alternative signalling provider — the main UK options being CSL, WebWayOne and Chiron — and any system still described as Redcare-signalled has either been migrated or is no longer transmitting.
Redcare was, for decades, the default UK alarm signalling path, and it was closely associated with the analogue phone network it grew up on. Its withdrawal was part of the wider retirement of that network.
If you have an older monitored alarm and have not heard from your provider about a signalling migration, that is worth chasing. The failure mode is quiet: an alarm whose signalling path has gone still sounds its siren locally, so a property can look protected while nothing is reaching an ARC at all.
The check is simple. Ask your monitoring provider, in writing, which signalling provider and path your system currently uses, and when it was last successfully polled. A monitored system is polled regularly by design, so they can answer that precisely.
Because this migration coincided with the phone network switch-off, some properties needed both a signalling change and a change of connection type at once. Treat any pre-2024 monitored alarm as needing confirmation.
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