What should a locksmith cost?

The honest answer to "how much does a locksmith cost" is that it depends on the lock, the door and the job, and anybody who answers it with one confident number before asking you anything is telling you about their marketing rather than about your door.

That is not an excuse, though, and this is where the trade loses people. "It depends" is true. "It depends, so I will tell you when I get there" is a different statement, and the second one is where the money goes wrong. Depending on the job does not stop you being given a figure before anyone sets off. It just means the questions come first.

So the useful question is not "what is the price". It is "what should the pricing look like, and what am I entitled to be told". Those have proper answers.

The Master Locksmiths Association publishes benchmark rates, which is the nearest thing this trade has to a published yardstick. At the time of writing they put labour at £85 an hour and upwards, a lockout at £90 and upwards, fitting an anti-snap euro cylinder at £137 and upwards, and replacing a mortice lock at £148 and upwards.

Read those as a floor, not a ceiling, and not as a quote. They are national figures, they do not know what time it is, where you live, or how many locks are on your door, and a genuinely awkward job can reasonably sit above them. What they are useful for is calibration. If a quote is wildly below those numbers, it is worth asking what has been left out of it, because the parts and the labour still have to be paid for by somebody and it is going to be you.

They also tell you something about the shape of a job. A lockout opened without damage is labour and nothing else. A lockout that ends in a drilled cylinder is labour plus a replacement cylinder plus the fitting of it, and on an ordinary uPVC door that difference is often most of the total.

A locksmith who comes to your home is entering into what the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 call an off-premises contract, and those regulations are not vague about price.

Before you are bound, the trader has to give you the total price including taxes, or, where the total genuinely cannot be worked out in advance, the manner in which the price will be calculated. That second limb is the important one for emergency work. "I cannot know until I see it" is an acceptable position only if it comes with the basis of the charge, so you know what you are agreeing to. "We will sort it out after" is not that.

Regulation 10(4) is the part worth remembering. Where the required information about charges has not been given, the consumer is not to bear the charges. An undisclosed charge is not simply unfair, it is not payable. The one that appears on the invoice having never been mentioned is, in plain terms, not yours to pay.

On top of that, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, in force from 6 April 2025, bans drip pricing outright. Drip pricing is the practice of advertising one figure and then adding unavoidable fees as you go. In this trade it usually appears as a low headline price with the call-out, the labour, the parts and a "difficulty" charge arriving afterwards. That is now unlawful, not merely poor practice.

There is a narrower rule for genuine emergencies, and it is narrower than people assume. Regulation 11 relaxes the full information requirements for urgent repair and maintenance work, but only where the price does not exceed £170, and even then you must still be given, in writing, the trader's identity, their geographical address and an estimate of the price.

Two things follow from that. A job priced above £170 does not get the relaxation at all, so the full duty applies. And even inside the exception, "we will tell you the price later" is not available. An estimate, in writing, before the work, is the minimum in the most urgent case the regulations contemplate.

There is a related point about upselling. The cancellation exclusion for urgent repairs does not extend to additional services sold on top of the urgent repair. If a locksmith attends to open your door and then sells you three new locks and an alarm, that additional work is not covered by the emergency exception, and your cancellation rights on it survive.

London Trading Standards gives consumers a piece of advice about locksmiths that is worth more than any price list, because it works even when you have no idea what the job involves. Ask for the price broken into three parts: the call-out charge, the labour, and the parts.

It works because it is very hard to be vague in three boxes. A quote of "about a hundred quid" can grow. A quote of "no call-out charge, one hour of labour at this rate, and if the cylinder needs replacing it is this much for the part" cannot grow quietly, because every place the money could come from has already been named. If somebody will not break it down, that is your answer, and it arrived before they drove anywhere.

It requires no knowledge of locks at all. It only requires you to ask the same question three times.

The Master Locksmiths Association sets out five questions for consumers, and they take about thirty seconds to ask on the phone.

Is this a fixed price or an estimate. Does it include VAT. Does it include labour. Is there a call-out charge. And what exactly does the price cover.

Every one of those is a place a bill commonly grows. An "estimate" that was never described as an estimate. A price that turns out to have been before VAT. Parts quoted without the labour to fit them. A call-out charge appearing as a separate line at the end. And the broadest of the five, what the price covers, which catches the case where the door is opened for the agreed figure and then the replacement lock, which was always going to be needed, is charged as though it were a surprise.

Ask them, and write down the answers. Which brings us to why writing them down matters.

Section 50 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 does something people underestimate. Anything said or written to you by the trader about the service, which you took into account when deciding to go ahead, becomes a term of the contract.

That means a price you were quoted on the phone is not a friendly indication. If you relied on it, it is a term, and the work is to be performed in accordance with it. The same applies to what they told you the job included, what they said about whether your lock would be damaged, and anything else you made your decision on.

This is why the phone call is the important moment, and why it is worth being slightly pedantic during it. Ask, get the answer, note the time and what was said. You are not being difficult, you are recording terms that already exist in law. Most of the time you will never need it. The times you do, nothing else will do.

A locksmith who intends to charge you fairly asks questions before quoting. What type of door is it, uPVC or timber or composite. Is there a key in the other side. Is the door locked with the key or just latched. Is anyone vulnerable inside. Those questions are not stalling, they are how a real figure gets calculated.

Then you should get a price, or a clearly explained basis for one, before they leave. If the job turns out to be materially different from what was described, the work stops and the new price is put to you before it is carried out, not after. You are entitled to say no at that point, and at the door.

The whole of it is that the price should exist before the work does.