How much does CCTV cost at home?

What changes the price at home

For how pricing works across homes and businesses, see our CCTV installation cost guide.

What is the best home CCTV set-up?

For most houses the honest answer is two to four wired cameras covering the approaches: front elevation, rear garden, side passage and driveway. Choose good night performance, and record locally to a recorder so there is no monthly fee.

A doorbell camera is a good doorstep witness but covers one narrow cone. DIY Wi-Fi kits work until the Wi-Fi or the batteries do not. If budget forces phasing, phase the positions, front first and rear second, rather than the quality. Two good cameras beat six struggling ones. Our guide on how many CCTV cameras you need helps you work out a count.

The three routes and what each really costs you

The pattern we see at surveys is that households buy route one, add route two, then call about route three after an incident the first two half-recorded.

Doorbell cameras are cheap to buy and often come with a monthly cloud charge. DIY kits cost less up front but you carry the work and the risk of dropouts. A wired professional system costs more at the start and has no subscription for recording, because footage stays on a recorder in your home. Our guide to the video doorbell against professional CCTV compares them.

The four positions that cover most houses

• Front elevation, about 2.5 to 3m up. The approach, the door and the drive edge. This is the camera that captures the face on the way in, not just the hood on the way out.
• Rear garden. Where break-ins tend to concentrate. Cover the patio doors and the fence line people climb.
• Side passage or blind side. The unwatched route between front and back. A narrow field of view or curtain-style coverage suits it.
• Driveway and vehicles. Angled to catch plates and door handles. This is also the camera that benefits most from night colour.

Skip cameras on every window, because approaches beat openings. Skip indoor cameras as the mainstay, because the evidence you want is outside. And skip anything pointed at the street or a neighbour's garden by default. See the law section below, and our guide to where to position CCTV cameras.

Night performance is the spec that earns its money

Domestic incidents skew towards darkness, and this is where camera ranges genuinely differ. Standard infrared gives usable black-and-white footage to a stated range, and the box figure is usually optimistic through British drizzle. The step worth paying for on the key positions, the front and the drive, is full-colour low-light, because clothing and vehicle colour turn a person approached into an actionable description.

On resolution, 4MP is a sensible floor, and 4K earns its place on wide drives. See our guide to CCTV camera resolution. A frame rate of 12 to 15 frames per second is usually enough, and smoother motion mostly eats recording days. For recording, a couple of weeks of local storage covers most holidays, and how much storage CCTV needs explains the sums.

What to send us for a price

• Photos of the front, back, side access and driveway
• How many cameras you think you need, or what worries you
• Where the router and a socket for the recorder are
• Whether you want to look at the cameras on your phone
• Whether you rent or own the house

Home CCTV and your neighbours

You can film your own property. If your cameras also record a public area or a neighbour's property, data protection law applies and there are rules to follow. The government guidance on domestic CCTV and the ICO both advise being able to explain why the coverage is needed, keeping it to what you need, telling people with a sign, and handling footage sensibly.

In practice at installs we angle cameras down and inward, mask the neighbour's windows and garden in the camera, put a small sign where a visitor would see it, and keep app access limited to the household. Done that way, home CCTV sits comfortably with both the neighbours and the law, and the footage stays usable if the police ever ask for it. Our guide to CCTV laws for homeowners covers the rules in more detail. Our CCTV work is done by an SSAIB certificated company.

Sources

• GOV.UK: guidance on the use of domestic CCTV