What London locksmiths publish about their prices: a source-linked survey

The short answer. We read the public websites of 32 London locksmith businesses. Most tell you very little about what the job will cost before you ring.

This is a survey of what businesses publish, not of what customers pay. It does not say any firm is dishonest. It says how much a person standing outside their front door can learn before they pick up the phone, and the answer, for most of these sites, is not much.

What we measured

For each business we read its own website, including every page we could find about prices or costs, and recorded what it says about six things. The wording we relied on is quoted in the table, and each business name links to the page it came from.

1. A price for a lockout, lock change, car lockout or call-out.
2. VAT: do the prices include it or not?
3. A call-out fee: is there one?
4. Out-of-hours prices: does the price change at night or weekends?
5. A minimum: can you work out the lowest amount you could pay?
6. A likely total: can you work out what you will probably pay, at your hour, for your job?

What we found

Prices are often missing. 16 of the 32 businesses publish no price for a lockout, lock change or call-out on the pages we read. 9 of them state that there is no call-out fee while giving no price for the work itself. A call-out fee is only one part of what the final bill is made of.

VAT is the biggest gap. Of the 16 that publish a price, 10 do not say whether VAT is included. For a VAT-registered firm the difference between a quoted £79 and £94.80 is the difference between a fair job and a surprise. 1 business states VAT both ways on different pages.

Out-of-hours pricing is nearly absent. Only 6 of 32 state anything specific about night, weekend or bank-holiday prices. Others say a night tariff “applies” without saying what it is. This is the figure a customer locked out at night needs, and the one least often published.

A few are clear. 1 business in the sample publish enough to estimate a total for a standard lockout: Auto Pro Locksmith. That is a high bar to clear and it shows it can be done.

Some pages disagree with each other. On 3 businesses we found the same domain showing different figures, VAT treatment or call-out treatment for the same job on different pages:

• City Locksmith London
• Locksmith1
• SMS Warehouses Ltd

We record this factually and make no claim about intent. Which page a customer happens to land on decides what they believe the price is.

What London firms advertise for a standard lockout

13 of the firms we read publish a price for getting you back into a house. They are different kinds of claim, so we do not pool them into an average:

• 7 advertise a “from” price, from £39 to £95, with a middle value of £75. A “from” price is a floor, not a quote.
• 6 advertise a range. The low ends run from £59 to £80 and the high ends from £89 to £150.
• 3 publish a separate, higher night or weekend figure, and 1 states that the price is the same at any hour. The others do not publish a separate night figure for a lockout.

VAT matters here: only some of these figures say whether VAT is included, so the rows are not like for like. Read the VAT column before comparing two firms. What a firm advertises is not what a customer pays: use it to judge whether a quote is in the normal range, then ask for one total, with VAT, at tonight’s hour.

Read between 29 August and 3 October 2026 2026; each firm’s own page is linked. Prices change without notice.

What to do with this if you are locked out

Before anyone travels, ask for one total, including VAT, at tonight’s hour, in writing, and ask three questions: Is that price with VAT? Is there a call-out fee? Does it change at this hour? A firm that cannot answer is telling you something. The price check and wait or call tools take you through it, and what a London locksmith should actually cost gives the bands. If you think you have been overcharged, here is what to do.

How we did it, and what it cannot tell you

• Not a random sample. Businesses were found by a fixed set of seven web searches (listed below) plus an earlier hand-collected set, not a census of every London locksmith. Firms that are good at search are more likely to be found, and may publish differently from those that are not.
• Published, not paid. We measure what a website says. We do not measure quotes given by telephone or what customers actually paid.
• Pages we read. “Not stated” means not stated on the pages we read: the homepage plus up to five pages found through links with price-related words. We checked a sample of the “no price” businesses against their own sitemaps and found no price pages we had missed.
• VAT. Where VAT is not stated we do not assume it. Where a price excludes VAT we say so and do not present a VAT-inclusive figure as the firm’s own.
• Method. 9 businesses were collected and checked by hand on 29 August 2026; 23 were read by software on 2026-10-03 and every quoted figure was checked word for word against the page, then reviewed by a person. One business appearing under two domains is counted once. A business that blocks automated readers is not read (we do not get round such blocks); a business that disallows it in its robots.txt is skipped.
• Edition 1. This is the first edition. If your business is listed and a row is wrong, write to [email protected] with the page, and we will correct it with the evidence. Nobody pays to be in or out of this table, and there is no ranking.

Search queries used: “locksmith prices london”; “emergency locksmith london call out fee”; “24 hour locksmith london lockout cost”; “locksmith south london”; “locksmith north london”; “locksmith east london”; “locksmith west london”.

The data

Download the table as a CSV (32 rows). Free to use; if you cite it, please link to this page. Businesses are listed alphabetically. That is not a ranking.

Prices are quoted as the business wrote them, with their own VAT wording where they gave any. “From” prices and ranges are not averaged: they are different kinds of claim. We take no payment from any business here and carry no advertising.

Published 3 October 2026. Hours, prices and websites change; each row carries the date we read it.