Mobile CCTV Tower Finance

What a mobile CCTV tower costs

There is no single answer until you decide how much of the build you are taking on yourself. Published UK prices for new towers run in four rough bands.

A bare shell — mast, chassis and housing, no electronics — starts around £5,000 + VAT. Pre-wired for solar panels and batteries, with the power system and cameras left to you, is roughly £10,000 to £12,000 + VAT. A tower built and powered but without cameras or recorder sits near £17,000 to £18,000 + VAT. A complete unit — thermal and colour cameras, 24/7 recording, hybrid power, ready to go out on hire the day it lands — is about £19,000 to £20,000 + VAT.

Lighter portable CCTV towers on castor wheels, pushed into position by hand rather than towed, sit below the trailer-mounted range. Used and ex-hire towers start from around £3,000. Treat all of this as the shape of the market rather than a quote — supplier list prices move, and fleet pricing usually starts at five units.

Buying used and ex-hire

Most of the mobile CCTV towers for sale second-hand are ex-hire stock coming off a supplier’s own fleet, which is the good end of used: the seller knows exactly how each unit has been run and serviced. Lenders will fund them. Age and condition matter, but the question that decides the application is usually whether the tower can be positively identified — more on that below.

Lead times

New builds commonly run eight to twelve weeks from order, and most mobile CCTV tower manufacturers build to order rather than holding stock. Ex-hire units can often be delivered immediately. If you are funding against a contract that starts on a fixed date, work backwards from the build slot, not the contract.

Mobile CCTV tower hire cost — and when owning beats it

Published hire rates start at roughly £160 a week for a monitored tower, with premium units carrying thermal cameras and alarm receiving centre monitoring costing considerably more. Set against manned guarding at £30 to £70 an hour, it is not difficult to see why the hire market has grown the way it has.

For a contractor with one site, hiring is almost always the right answer. For a security firm the arithmetic reverses, because you are not paying the hire rate — you are collecting it. A tower earning £160 a week for forty weeks returns somewhere around £6,400 gross in a year, before monitoring revenue and before the fuel, servicing and recovery costs that sit against it.

Which is the whole game: utilisation decides everything. A site CCTV tower on hire eleven months a year is a good asset. The same tower stood in the yard for six is an expensive one. Before committing to a fleet expansion, be honest about the contracted work behind it — because it is the first thing a lender will ask, and the first thing you will wish you had asked yourself.

What lenders look at

Towers are funded as plant and machinery, normally on hire purchase over three to five years, or on lease where you would rather not own them outright. Three things decide how straightforward the application is.

Whether the tower can be identified

This is the one most people do not see coming. A road-legal trailer-mounted unit has a chassis number and a plated weight rating, so it can be identified, tied to the agreement and recovered if things go wrong. A castor-wheel unit is, from a lender’s side of the desk, a box on wheels with a serial number if you are lucky. Both are fundable — but the trailer-mounted tower is the easier conversation and usually the better rate. If you are choosing between the two on price alone, that difference belongs in the sum.

The work behind the fleet

Buying to hire out means the asset is bought against expected income rather than to use in your own business, so it is assessed on your trading position and the contracts behind it. A signed framework or a named client is worth considerably more to an application than confidence about demand.

Fleet orders and staged delivery

Suppliers will stage delivery across a fleet order — five now, five next quarter. Funding can be staged to match, so you are not servicing debt on ten towers while five are still being built. Say so at the outset; it is far easier to structure that way round than to unpick afterwards.

The tax change that matters to hire fleets

If you buy towers to hire out, full expensing never applied to you — it excludes assets bought for leasing. That changed on 1 January 2026. The new permanent 40% first-year allowance reaches leasing providers for the first time, alongside unincorporated businesses. Second-hand assets are excluded, so it applies to new towers rather than ex-hire stock.

At the same time the main writing-down allowance dropped from 18% to 14%, so anything falling into the pool now unwinds more slowly than it used to. Together those two changes make buying new materially more attractive than it was in 2025. Our capital allowances page has the detail, the Annual Investment Allowance page explains why buying on hire purchase does not cost you the relief, and the UK Budget and what it means for SMEs covers the wider picture. We are credit brokers rather than tax advisers — your accountant confirms your own position.

What to send us

Tell us how many towers, new or ex-hire, trailer-mounted or castor, and what the work behind them looks like. If you have a supplier quote, send it. If you are still choosing between suppliers, we will look at the funding against each — the cheapest tower and the cheapest deal are not always the same one. No credit check to ask.