Raleigh Alarm Registration and False Alarm Fees Explained
Raleigh gives you a written warning for the first false alarm in a fiscal year, then charges $50 for the second, $100 each for the third through fifth, $200 for the sixth and seventh, $300 for the eighth and ninth, and $500 for the tenth and every one after. The count resets each July. Late payment adds $25, and unpaid penalties can end police response to your alarm.
Nobody reads the alarm ordinance until the first invoice arrives. By then the cause is usually months old: a motion sensor pointed at a heat vent, a delivery driver with a code nobody canceled, or a back door that swells shut in August and pops open in January. The fees are designed to make you fix that, and they climb fast.
How does the fee schedule work?
Penalties run on the city fiscal year, July through June. Your count starts again each July, which is worth knowing if you have had a bad spring.
| False alarm in the fiscal year | Penalty |
|---|---|
| 1st | Written warning |
| 2nd | $50 |
| 3rd, 4th, 5th | $100 each |
| 6th, 7th | $200 each |
| 8th, 9th | $300 each |
| 10th and after | $500 each |
Payment is due within 30 days. Miss that and a $25 late fee is added. Leave it 60 days and the city may suspend police response to alarm activations at your address. At 90 days the account goes to a collection agency. Check the current ordinance before you budget, because fee schedules do get revised.
What counts as a false alarm?
An alarm is counted as false when officers attend and find no evidence of an unauthorized entry, robbery or other crime that would have set off a properly working system. It is a judgment made on site.
There are exceptions written into the ordinance. An activation is not counted against you when it was caused by a natural or man made catastrophe, by vandalism that physically damaged the property, or by an attempted entry that left visible damage. A storm that takes a door off its hinges is not your fault, and the ordinance says so.
If you believe a charge is wrong, you can appeal in writing to the alarm administrator. The window is short, ten days from being notified, so open the envelope.
Do you have to register your alarm with the city?
Alarm users in Raleigh are expected to have an account on file with the city alarm administrator, and that account is how activations, notices and penalties are tracked to your address. In practice your monitoring company usually sets this up when the system goes live, and it is the step most often skipped when a business changes monitoring providers or a homeowner takes over a system left by a previous owner.
Two things worth doing today:
- Call your monitoring company and confirm the alarm account is in your name, at your address, with a current contact list.
- Ask the Raleigh Police Department alarm administrator to confirm the record matches. Contact details are on the city false alarm page.
Cameras on their own are a different matter. A camera system with no monitored alarm attached does not dispatch anybody, so there is nothing to register and no false alarm exposure.
What is the security camera registry, and is it required?
Raleigh Police run a voluntary camera registry. You add your address and the general direction your cameras face, and that information goes onto a map only the department can see. When something happens near you, investigators know who to call instead of knocking door to door.
Registering does not give anybody a live feed of your cameras and does not hand over recordings. Officers still have to ask you for footage. It is voluntary, it is free, and for a business on a busy block it is a reasonable thing to do.
What actually causes false alarms?
Five faults account for most of the activations we get called out to fix in Midtown and around North Hills.
- Motion sensors aimed at moving air. A ceiling diffuser, a radiant heater or a swinging sign in a shop window will trip a passive infrared sensor when the temperature swings. Aim sensors away from vents and glass.
- Doors that move with the season. Humid Carolina summers swell wood. A contact that just about lines up in March will not in July. Adjust the gap or move to a wide gap contact.
- Codes that outlived the person. Cleaners, ex staff and a contractor from two years ago should not still have a working code. Access control fixes this properly, and even without it, codes should be individual and revoked the day someone leaves.
- Flat backup batteries. Panel and siren batteries last three to five years. A tired battery causes odd behavior during a power blip, and Wake County gets plenty of those in summer storm season.
- Pets and stock movement. A balloon delivery, a pallet settling, or a cat that has learned to climb shelving will all set off a standard sensor. Pet tolerant and dual technology sensors exist for exactly this.
How do you get off the list once you are on it?
Work through it in order. Pull the activation history from your monitoring company and find the pattern: one zone, one time of day, or one day of the week will usually stand out. Fix that zone physically, whether that is a sensor angle, a door adjustment or a replacement device. Re-cut the user codes so each person has their own. Then set entry and exit times that suit how people actually use the building rather than the default the panel shipped with.
Finally, keep the call list current. Half the false dispatches we see are alarms that could have been canceled on the phone if the monitoring station had reached somebody with the passcode.
Where to go next
If your alarm is tripping and nobody can tell you why, that is a survey rather than a guess. Our alarm systems page explains how we set up zones and codes so the system fits how your building is used. We will also check your city alarm account and the registry before the system goes live.