How much does a locksmith cost in the UK?

Locked out, or standing in front of a lock that has simply stopped working, most people ask the same question straight away: how much is this going to cost? There is no single official price list for locksmiths in the UK — the trade is not price-regulated, and individual firms set their own rates — but a consistent pattern shows up across price guides and comparison sites, and it gives you a reasonable band to check any quote against.

The call-out fee — what you pay simply for a locksmith to travel to you — typically sits somewhere between £30 and £95. Some firms fold this into the first hour of labour, others charge it as a separate flat fee on top of the work itself. It is always worth asking, before anyone gets in a van, whether the call-out charge is included in the total or added afterwards.

For standard daytime work, roughly between 8am and 6pm, hourly labour rates commonly fall somewhere around £65 to £85, broadly in line with the typical UK labour rate cited by industry bodies such as the Master Locksmiths Association. Rates in London and the South East tend to run noticeably higher than the national picture — often by roughly 20 to 30 percent — while rural areas can sit toward the lower end.

Replacing a standard lock — a Yale-style nightlatch cylinder or a five-lever mortice deadlock — typically costs somewhere in the region of £100 to £150, including parts and labour, for a straightforward job on a standard wooden or composite door. UPVC doors with multipoint locking mechanisms are a different story, and usually cost more to sort out properly; we explain exactly why in a separate article on UPVC door lock problems.

Where costs rise sharply is outside normal working hours. Evening, weekend and especially overnight or emergency call-outs typically carry a significant premium on top of the standard rate, and quotes for a genuine middle-of-the-night lockout can run well above £150. As with every figure in this guide, treat it as a rough steer rather than a fixed number — prices vary by region and time of day, and the only way to know the real cost is to ask for a quote for your specific situation before agreeing to anything.

A handful of factors reliably push the final bill higher: non-standard or high-security cylinders, of the kind rated under the TS007 anti-snap star system explained in our UPVC lock article, any damage to the door or frame that needs separate repair, how far the locksmith has to travel, and whether the job can be done without forcing entry at all. Non-destructive entry — picking or manipulating a lock open rather than drilling it out — is usually cheaper in the long run, because you are not also paying to replace the lock afterwards.

It also helps to know roughly what different jobs involve, since "a locksmith call-out" can mean very different things. A simple lockout resolved by picking a basic cylinder is normally at the cheaper end of the scale. A broken key extraction is usually a shorter job than a full lock change, and often priced closer to the call-out fee than to a full lock replacement. A UPVC multipoint lock repair, by contrast, can involve diagnosing a worn gearbox or misaligned hinges rather than a straightforward swap, which is one reason quotes for UPVC problems tend to sit higher than a simple cylinder change — covered in detail in our separate article on UPVC lock problems.

Many locksmiths are sole traders or small local businesses rather than large national chains, and this is not a red flag in itself — in fact, a longstanding local, independent locksmith is often exactly the kind of business worth using. What matters is transparency rather than company size: ask whether VAT is included in the price quoted, since a headline figure without VAT added can look cheaper than it turns out to be once the invoice arrives.

The single most useful habit, covered in more depth in our guide to avoiding rogue call-out firms, is simple: get a price before any work starts, not after. Ask whether the figure quoted is fixed or an estimate, ask for the call-out fee, labour and parts to be broken down separately, and be wary of a low headline price on a search advert that turns into a much larger figure once someone is standing on your doorstep.

To put a specific number on your own job, the most reliable approach is still to compare quotes from a small number of established local locksmiths rather than relying on averages alone. Our directory lists locksmiths across towns and cities in the UK, so you can see who covers your area before you ever need to call anyone in an emergency.

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