Best Time to Advertise Security Alarm: January

MoneyGeek pulled three years of monthly burglary counts for the 74 largest US cities reporting to the FBI and tested the claim every alarm marketing calendar is built on. The result: summer burglary runs just 5.6% above the rest of the year nationally.

Not 20%. Not 30%. Under six.

Then the number splits. Minneapolis logs about 283 burglaries a month in June through August against 193 the rest of the year, a 47% summer lift. Riverside, California runs at negative 12.3%, meaning summer is the safest burglary season it has. Pacific Coast cities average negative 2%, with ten of fourteen recording fewer burglaries in summer.

So the honest answer to when you should advertise is not "summer." It is: January, and the reason has almost nothing to do with crime.

The short answer

Spend heavily in January through April, stay present but shift channel in November, and treat June through August as a commercial and retention season rather than a residential acquisition season.

That calendar is inverted from what most dealers run, and it is inverted for a specific reason: the alarm year has two separate clocks. Your demand clock is driven by household events. Your cost clock is driven by retail advertising. They peak at different times, and the gap between them is where the margin is.

Why the summer premise fails in most markets

The seasonality claim that drives alarm advertising is inherited, not measured. It comes from an era of higher burglary rates and it gets repeated by everyone from local news to the Insurance Information Institute.

MoneyGeek's city-level data is the cleanest test of it published recently, and the takeaway is not that the pattern is fake. It is that the pattern is local, and that a national average tells you nothing useful about your service area.

If you sell in Minneapolis, a summer campaign built on burglary risk is well supported. If you sell in San Diego, you are running fear-based creative during the safest quarter of your year, and any homeowner who checks the local numbers will find that out.

The competitor you are actually bidding against in summer

Here is the part the burglary data misses. Even in Minneapolis, summer is a bad residential buy, because of who else is in the market.

May through August is the peak door-knocking season for the national alarm dealer programs. The cycle is well documented: recruiting on college campuses from January to March, spring training in April, then reps knocking six days a week from roughly 3pm to 9pm from May through August. Thousands of temporary reps, housed and transported, saturating suburban neighbourhoods.

That is a lot of free contact with the exact household you are paying to reach. You are buying a $2 click to talk to a homeowner who had a rep standing on their porch at 6:30pm last Tuesday.

And you are buying it into a hostile mood. In a widely-read June 2026 thread in r/FirstTimeHomeBuyer, a former door-to-door rep of seven years posted an insider's warning about the summer season. The top replies are not curious. They are furious:

"I will never, ever, ever buy anything from any D2D sales person."

"Repitable companies don't do door to door bullshit."

The second comment is from a pest control operator of 13 years, and the rest of it is the most useful sentence in the thread for an alarm dealer:

"We gain a lot of customers from door knockers because they give out promises they can't make and have shitty technicians. Works beautiful for us."

That is the summer play for a local company, and it is not a bidding war. It is being the credible local alternative in a season when a national brand has spent four months damaging the category's trust in your city. Which is a positioning job, and positioning jobs run on Google Business Profile, reviews and search presence, not on cold feed spend.

Your churn peaks in the same months your adds do

This is the part that changes the arithmetic, and almost no alarm marketing content mentions it.

Industry gross attrition runs around 10% a year, and Security Sales & Integration's guidance is tighter still: under 7% is acceptable, and smaller companies should hold below 6%. The single largest driver is not price and not service. It is moving. As SSI puts it, "moves are consistently one of the biggest, if not the biggest reason for attrition."

Now overlay the moving calendar. Roughly 60 to 70% of all US household moves happen between May and September, per American Moving and Storage Association data and moveBuddha's tracking, with June, July and August the busiest and most expensive months to hire a mover.

Put those two facts together and a summer that looks like your best acquisition quarter is also, mechanically, your worst retention quarter. Gross adds in June overstate net RMR growth more than gross adds in February do, because the same season is pulling accounts off the back end.

The fix is not to stop selling in summer. It is to run a mover program, which is the only campaign that converts your worst churn driver into two acquisition events:

1. Follow the customer who is leaving. They have a working relationship with you, they are moving inside your service area more often than not, and a transfer offer with a free reinstall costs a fraction of a new acquisition. SafeHome.org's 2026 survey of 2,435 US adults found 21% of people who switched security providers did so because they moved homes. Every one of those is a switch you could have prevented.
2. Take the address they left. A house that had a monitored system now has a new owner, existing wiring, and a panel on the wall. That is a takeover conversation with a much lower install cost than a greenfield sale.

Run both from your CRM on a move-out trigger rather than from a campaign calendar, and summer stops being a leaky bucket. The channel detail for reaching movers specifically is in security alarm Meta ads that actually work.

The four triggers that actually run the alarm year

Residential alarm is not a seasonal purchase in the way HVAC is. Nobody's alarm fails in a heatwave. It is an event-triggered purchase, and there are four events worth building a calendar around.

1. The move (May to September). The strongest single trigger in the trade, covered above. Peak volume in June, July and August, with the busiest individual days at month end.

2. Darkness (early November to March). When daylight saving time ends in early November, sunset jumps back an hour and the evening commute goes dark overnight. The best evidence for what that does comes from Doleac and Sanders, published in the Review of Economics and Statistics in 2015, which used DST as a natural experiment across 558 US jurisdictions. When DST begins in spring and evenings gain light, daily robbery falls about 7%, and robbery in the hour after sunset falls about 27%. The study measured robbery rather than residential burglary, so do not overstate it. But the mechanism is ambient light, and the calendar runs the other way in November. Households feel that change in a single week, every year, on a known date.

3. Deliveries (October to December). Security.org's 2025 package theft report found 64 million Americans, one in four, have had a package stolen, with $8.2 billion of orders taken over the past year at an average value of about $222. In the same report, adults expect 25 packages between October and December, double a typical three-month period, and nearly 70% of holiday shopping happens online. Doorbell cameras are already the most common device among online shoppers at 34% adoption.

4. Budget cycles (January to April, and September). This is the commercial trigger, and it is the most predictable of the four. School district fiscal years typically run July to June, with budgets approved by June 30 and installs done over the summer break. A proposal that lands in May has missed the decision by a quarter. Securitas Technology's monitoring data shows retail alarm activity peaks in May, June and July, with a second peak in December and January, which means retail operators are most receptive to a conversation in the early spring, ahead of their own busy window.

Not one of those four is "it got warm outside."

The media auction runs on a different calendar than your demand

Now the cost clock, which is where January earns its place at the top.

Meta's auction is priced by retail advertisers, not by you. Superads' data shows the global median Meta CPC held in a tight $1.05 to $1.15 band through most of 2025, peaked at $1.32 in November, and then reset to $0.85 in January 2026. On the US CPM series, November 2025 peaked at $27.40, a 20.7% jump from October, the single biggest monthly move of the year. Q4 US CPMs averaged $25.49, roughly 22% above Q1.

The gap between the November peak and the January floor is about 36%. Same platform, same audience, same creative. A third off, for waiting six weeks.

Two practical notes on that table.

November is a real demand month and a terrible buying month. Both things are true at once. The resolution is channel, not budget: put November money into Google Business Profile, local search and Local Services Ads, where you are paying for people who are already looking, and keep your feed spend small. Interruption advertising is what gets expensive in November. Intent capture does not, to nearly the same degree.

The "Q5" window is underused in this trade. From Boxing Day through mid-January, retail bidders exit the auction faster than consumer attention does. That is the cheapest attention of the year, it lands immediately after the package-theft peak, and almost no alarm dealer is running then because the office is quiet.

Match the offer to the month

Changing the budget without changing the offer is why most seasonal plans underperform. Different months have different triggers active, and each trigger wants a different thing sold to it.

The single most important number here: SafeHome.org's 2026 survey found that among non-users, 28% intend to buy security cameras and 22% video doorbells in the next 12 months, against just 5% for professional monitoring. The device offer has roughly four to five times the addressable intent of the monitored contract offer.

Note what is absent: a monitored contract sold cold to a residential audience, in any month. That offer works on a warm audience and on high-intent search. It does not work as a cold interruption, in January or in July, and the reason is the 5% intent ceiling rather than your creative.

What to do in your two busiest months

Whichever two months carry your peak install load, the instinct is to keep buying leads through them. Do less of that, and do these instead.

Keep branded search on, always. It is cheap, it converts better than anything else you run, and letting a competitor bid your company name while your techs are booked out three weeks is an unforced error.

Cap rather than kill. Some leads are worth having at any price, particularly commercial and takeover. Set a budget cap instead of switching campaigns off, because restarting a paused campaign costs you the learning phase all over again.

Bank the customers you already have. Peak season is when review requests, referral asks and upgrade conversations get dropped, and those are precisely what make the next quiet quarter less quiet. A practitioner in r/smallbusiness described the discipline well when asked what to do about a dead January: use the busy season to pre-sell it, so that "January is full of work you sold at full price during the rush, instead of a sale that just teaches everyone to wait for the sale."

Do not discount into the slow month. The same thread is a warning label on that reflex. The original poster's honest summary of five years of January promotions: a sale that "mostly just trained people to wait for the sale." In a recurring-revenue business, that is worse than a lost month, because a discounted RMR contract is a permanently lower-valued asset.

Build your own calendar in four steps

The calendar above is a default. Yours should be built from your own numbers, and it takes an afternoon.

1. Plot 24 months of your own installs by month. Not leads. Installs, and split residential from commercial. Most dealers discover their commercial line peaks a full quarter away from their residential line, and that the two need separate budgets.
2. Plot your cancellations by month on the same chart, with reason codes. If moves are your top code, check whether the peak lands in your summer. If it does, you have a mover program to build before you have an ad calendar to fix.
3. Pull your own city's monthly burglary counts. Three years of data from your police open data portal or the FBI Crime Data Explorer. That number decides whether risk-based creative is honest in your market and gives you a local statistic to use in it.
4. Overlay your media cost by month from your own ad accounts. Your November-to-January delta will not match the global median exactly, but the shape will hold. Spend where your demand and your cost curves diverge in your favour.

Two of those four steps come out of your CRM rather than your ad platform, which is usually where the exercise stalls. If cancellation reasons are not coded, or move-outs are not triggering anything, the calendar cannot be built at all. That is a data problem before it is a marketing problem, and it is the same one behind why security alarm leads do not convert.

Two mistakes this calendar prevents

Judging a channel on the wrong month. A Meta campaign that looks broken in November may be performing exactly as November should when the auction is 20% up and your creative has not changed. Compare the same month across years, not consecutive months, or you will kill a channel for doing its job.

Planning on a flat monthly average. A plan that says 18 installs a month will not describe any actual month. Summer runs hot on residential and cold on commercial, and January runs the other way. Budget on the shape, not the mean. The model for sizing that target is in how many security alarm leads you need per month.

The underlying point

The HVAC version of this question has a clean answer, because HVAC demand is created by weather and weather is predictable. We wrote that calendar in best time to advertise HVAC, and the whole discipline there is buying six weeks ahead of the turn.

Alarm does not work that way, and borrowing the HVAC logic is how dealers end up spending their money in the wrong quarter. There is no turn. There is no season when every panel in a region fails at once. What there is instead is a steady flow of household events, spread through the year, plus one enormous seasonal distortion in what it costs to reach anybody.

Which reduces to a simpler instruction than a seasonal one. Be present when the trigger fires, and buy your presence in the months it is on sale. In practice that means the bulk of the budget lands between January and April, November gets attention on search rather than on the feed, and summer is spent defending the accounts you already have while the door knockers sell against themselves.

For where the budget should go once the timing is right, the best lead sources for security alarm companies ranks each channel on the cost to create a dollar of RMR, and what security alarm leads cost has the price detail by segment.

Sources

• MoneyGeek, Summer Burglary by Region: Where the Pattern Reverses, three years of monthly burglary counts across the 74 largest US cities reporting to the FBI. moneygeek.com
• Jennifer L. Doleac and Nicholas J. Sanders, Under the Cover of Darkness: How Ambient Light Influences Criminal Activity, Review of Economics and Statistics 97(5), 2015, 558 US jurisdictions. direct.mit.edu
• Security.org, 2025 Package Theft Report: 64 million Americans affected, $8.2 billion stolen, 25 packages expected October to December. security.org
• SafeHome.org, 2026 Home Security Market Report, nationally representative survey of 2,435 US adults, January 29 to February 11, 2026: purchase intent by product, switching reasons. safehome.org
• Superads Meta CPC and CPM series 2025 to 2026, reported by Pace Ads: $1.32 November CPC peak, $0.85 January 2026, $27.40 US November CPM. paceads.com
• Security Sales & Integration, Calculating Your Account Attrition (and How to Keep it Low): moves as the leading attrition driver, sub-7% benchmark. securitysales.com
• Acquisition & Funding Services, Attrition in the Alarm Industry: 10% industry standard gross attrition. afssmartfunding.com
• moveBuddha, When is Peak Moving Season, and American Moving and Storage Association data: 60 to 70% of US moves occur May through September. movebuddha.com
• Securitas Technology, 3 Ways to Prepare Your Retail Business for Peak Alarm Season: retail alarm activity peaks May to July, second peak December to January. securitastechnology.com
• Alliance Dealer Program and CanvassLite, alarm door-to-door season structure: January to March recruiting, April training, May to August knocking. alliancedealerprogram.com
• r/FirstTimeHomeBuyer, June 2026 thread on the summer door-to-door season. reddit.com
• r/smallbusiness, on planning for a dead January. reddit.com