How To Start A Security Company in Wyoming (2026 Guide)

Wyoming licenses dance hall operators. It licenses bowling alleys, junk dealers, carnivals and pawnbrokers. Title 33 has 49 chapters of occupational licensing and not one of them mentions a security guard.

This is not recent deregulation. Wyoming has simply never legislated here, so there is no licensing act, no exemption to reason from and no board to write to.

What Wyoming does instead is put your industry on a list — by NAICS code, by name — in its workers' compensation statute. That line shapes a Wyoming guard company's first month more than any licence would, and it is what new operators find out about last.

The whole path, in order

Nothing here waits on a state regulator, because there is none. The one step that must genuinely come first is the one nobody expects.

1. 1

   Open the workers' compensation account

   1 week

   Blocks everything downstream — start it early

   Register with the Department of Workforce Services at WYUI.wyo.gov. Guard services sit on the extrahazardous list by NAICS group, so coverage is not a choice and it has to exist before work begins in Wyoming — not before your first payroll run, before the first shift.

2. 2

   File with the Secretary of State

   1–3 days

   One hundred dollars for articles of organization or incorporation. Wyoming then bills an annual report licence tax of $60 or two-tenths of one mill on your Wyoming assets, whichever is larger, so a company that buys vehicles here pays more than one that leases them.

3. 3

   Appoint a Wyoming registered agent

   Same week

   Wyoming requires a registered agent with a physical address in the state who consents to the appointment. Out-of-state owners forming here for the tax treatment routinely skip this and find the entity administratively delinquent a year later.

4. 4

   Bind general liability

   1–2 weeks

   Blocks everything downstream — start it early

   The state sets no figure, so the market sets it. A mine operator in Campbell County, a hospital in Casper and a Cheyenne data-centre general contractor will each specify their own limits, and none of them will accept the $100,000 Cheyenne considers adequate.

5. 5

   Decide whether Cheyenne is in your plan

   4–6 weeks if yes

   The capital is the only city in Wyoming that licenses you. Chapter 5.48 means $140, a $10,000 bond, a photograph, proof of citizenship and a chief of police investigation that starts within 30 days of filing. Everywhere else in the state, this step disappears entirely.

6. 6

   Write the standard nobody else will

   1–2 weeks

   With no state training hours and no city training requirement even in Cheyenne, your post orders, screening policy and use-of-force position are the only competency record in existence. In Wyoming they are also a sales document, because prospects have nothing else to compare you on.

7. 7

   Settle the armed question

   1 week

   There is no armed guard permit in Wyoming. Cheyenne's ordinance simply points at W.S. 6-8-104, the general concealed firearm permit issued by the Attorney General's Division of Criminal Investigation, which is a civilian credential and not a security qualification. Your range standard is the only one.

8. 8

   Go live and hold the filings

   Ongoing

   Annual report on the entity's anniversary month, quarterly workers' compensation reporting to DWS, and the Cheyenne bond kept in force for the whole licence term. A lapsed bond starts a suspension, and the licence is not transferable if you restructure.

Step 1: Register With Workers' Comp Before Anyone Works

Most guides put entity formation first. In Wyoming that is the wrong order.

Why guard companies are on the list

W.S. 27-14-108 enumerates extrahazardous employment by NAICS sector, and subsection (a)(ii)(M) reaches into administrative and support services to pick out exactly two industry groups. One is 5617, services to buildings and dwellings. The other is 5616 — investigation, guard and armored car services. You are named.

What that changes practically

Employers outside the list may elect coverage, and must cover everyone if they do. You do not get that decision. Open the DWS account first, then start quoting work — including the short trial post a prospect offers you next week.

Step 2: Form Your Legal Business Entity

With no licence tied to your legal form, entity choice is purely a liability and tax question, and Wyoming is a state people incorporate in on purpose.

Articles cost $100 for an LLC or a corporation alike. The recurring charge is the unusual part: the annual report is a licence tax of $60 or two-tenths of one mill per dollar of assets located in Wyoming, whichever is greater. A company that owns patrol vehicles and a building pays more than one that leases everything — worth knowing before you buy a fleet.

The registered agent trap

Wyoming requires a registered agent with a physical in-state address who has consented to act. Owners forming here from Colorado — Cheyenne is closer to Fort Collins than to Casper — treat this as a formality and then miss the annual report notice that goes to the agent.

Step 3: Insurance, the Cheyenne Bond and What Clients Demand

The only written insurance standard for a guard company anywhere in Wyoming is municipal, and it is modest: $100,000 per occurrence with a $200,000 annual aggregate under Cheyenne's Chapter 5.48. The ordinance disapplies it to applicants doing detective work exclusively — Cheyenne treats the guarding, not the investigating, as the risky half. The city also wants a security bond of not less than $10,000, conditioned on compliance with all laws and in force for the full licence term.

Outside Cheyenne nobody specifies anything, so your limits come from procurement documents. Expect $1 million per occurrence with additional-insured status for anything institutional, and more at a mine or an energy site.

Step 4: Clear Cheyenne's Chapter 5.48 If You Work the Capital

Cheyenne is the whole of Wyoming's security regulation, and it applies inside the city limits only.

The application goes to the city clerk with $140, a photograph, proof of citizenship, your principal place of business, how long you have lived in Wyoming, and a disclosure of arrests or convictions involving moral turpitude. Partnerships need every partner to verify it; corporations need the president and secretary plus the incorporation documents. The chief of police then begins an investigation within 30 days.

What the ordinance no longer does

Cheyenne repealed its individual patrolman and guard registration in 2019. The city licenses the business and leaves employee vetting to you — the qualifications section makes the licensee responsible for background checks on its own people. Older write-ups still describe guard identification cards the city stopped issuing.

What it actually costs

There is no fee table on this page because Wyoming publishes no security licensing fees to tabulate. The state charges nothing for permission to guard.

Year-one cash is the $100 entity filing, a free EIN, general liability from a broker who writes guard services, the DWS workers' compensation premium set against your class code and payroll, uniforms, vehicles — and, if Cheyenne is on your map, $140 plus the premium on a $10,000 bond.

Step 5: Set Your Own Hiring and Training Standard

Wyoming issues no guard card, so no background check has been run for you and nobody has verified any minimum competency.

That makes documentation the product. Run criminal history checks yourself and record what you ran and what disqualifies. Write post orders detailed enough that an officer can hold a site unsupervised. Fix your incident report format before the first incident. Every competitor can say "licensed and insured" — the operator who hands a prospect a real training file wins on a distinction the state never created.

Step 6: Uniforms, Vehicles and Armed Officers

Outside Cheyenne there are no rules at all, which is why the Cheyenne rules are the sensible standard to adopt statewide.

The ordinance bars licensees and their employees from impersonating peace officers, bars any vehicle with a siren or blinker light, and bars insignia resembling police insignia — while expressly allowing a uniform and badge identifying the wearer as a licensee's employee. The siren and light ban is stricter than most municipal rules, which stop at door lettering, and it is cheaper to follow everywhere than to remember at a city boundary.

Step 7: Go Live Across Wyoming's Markets

Wyoming is half a million people spread across the ninth largest state, and its markets barely overlap.

• Cheyenne is government, the Front Range data-centre build-out, and the only place a licence stands between you and the work.
• Casper is oilfield services and healthcare — second-largest city, completely unregulated for security.
• Gillette and the Powder River Basin are coal, oil and gas, where contractor prequalification is the real entry test.
• Laramie is university and I-80 corridor work, with sharp event peaks and long quiet stretches.
• Jackson and Teton County are resort, event and estate work, on a seasonal labour market unlike anywhere else in the state.

Step 8: Build Smart, Not Fast

The absence of a licence makes the barrier to entry low for you and identical for everyone else reading this page.

Get the employment mechanics right early — offer letters, overtime classification, honest time records, travel pay for the two-hour drives Wyoming contracts routinely involve. Our security guard labor law guide is pitched at California's stricter rules, but the mechanics transfer whole. If you plan to follow the energy work north across the line, build to a higher standard now: Montana runs a real state licensing programme and will not care that Wyoming did not.

Your launch checklist

Ticks are stored in this browser, so you can work down the list over weeks.

Bonus: Use Technology to Stay Compliant and Professional

In a state with a monopoly workers' compensation fund, your claims record is the only thing you control about your largest recurring premium — and claims records are built from incident documentation, checkpoint history and honest shift notes. A platform such as Safetrac puts a time and a location behind every patrol and keeps incident files retrievable when someone disputes what happened. The pricing page sets out what that costs.

Final Thoughts

Wyoming makes it easy to start and offers no help with the hard part. You can be trading within a month, and so can everyone else, which is why the bottom of this market competes on price alone.

The operators who climb out of it have usually noticed the same thing. Wyoming did write a standard for this industry — it wrote it in the workers' compensation act rather than a licensing chapter. The state decided guarding is hazardous work and made you insure it accordingly. Taking that seriously, with training, documentation and a claims record you would show a client, is the difference between competing on rate and being the obvious choice.

Resources & Links:

• Wyoming Statutes Title 33 — Professions and Occupations
• W.S. 27-14-108 — extrahazardous industries and employments
• Wyoming Department of Workforce Services — employer coverage
• Cheyenne Municipal Code Chapter 5.48
• Wyoming Secretary of State business filing fees