What a locksmith costs in London

There is no official price list for locksmithing in the United Kingdom. There is no regulator to publish one, so every firm sets its own numbers, and those numbers move with the hour, the day, the borough and how worried you sound on the phone.

That absence is the whole problem. If you do not know roughly what a job costs, you cannot tell a fair quote from an outrageous one — and the person on the other end of the phone knows that.

We have measured how bad the gap is. We read the websites of 32 London locksmith businesses: what they publish about their prices, and what they leave out, with every figure linked to its source.

Roughly what things cost

As a rough orientation: a simple lockout opened without damage is the cheapest common job, and the small hours carry a real premium on top. A lockout where the lock has to be drilled and replaced costs materially more, because you are buying a lock as well as a visit. A uPVC multipoint mechanism is the most expensive job on the usual list.

The exact bands, job by job and hour by hour, are on the price check tool and in what a London locksmith should actually cost. The price check and the now or morning tool read the same figures from one file, so those two cannot drift apart from each other.

Read them as indicative bands, not quotes. They are a reading of publicly advertised prices and published cost guides, cross-checked against the Master Locksmiths Association’s own reporting on overcharging. Nobody here has phoned forty firms and recorded what they said. The prices page states that method openly, and says what would be better, because a number with no stated method is a confident guess with a table around it.

The night premium is real. Three times the day rate is not.

Someone is getting out of bed, driving across London and carrying stock. A genuine premium of roughly fifty to a hundred percent over the daytime rate is normal and fair.

A night rate three or four times the daytime rate, which appears only after the van has arrived, is not a premium. It is a captive audience.

The practical consequence is worth acting on. If you are safe, warm and it is nine in the evening, ask what a booked appointment tomorrow morning would cost. Hearing both numbers in the same call is often the cheapest thirty seconds of your week. The now or morning tool works through whether waiting is actually safe in your situation, and it refuses to suggest waiting when anybody is trapped, when medication is inside, when the door cannot be secured, or when you have nowhere warm to go.

The question that protects you

Before anyone travels, ask for the total you will pay — callout, labour, parts and VAT — for the job as you have described it. Then ask what would make that number change.

A firm that gives you a total is telling you it intends to honour it. A firm that will only say “from £49” or “the engineer will assess on arrival” has told you something useful too. The gap between the advertised figure and the final bill is the whole mechanism behind the overcharging scam, and the reported cases run to thousands of pounds rather than an extra fifty.

What genuinely drives the price up

• The hour. Nights, Sundays and bank holidays cost more everywhere.
• Central London and same-hour attendance. Both push toward the top of the band.
• Whether the lock survives. A lock opened without damage costs less than a lock drilled out and replaced — and most standard UK domestic locks can be opened without damage by somebody competent.
• What you are fitting. A rated anti-snap cylinder costs more than a basic one, and it is usually worth it. See door locks and standards.

If you think you were overcharged

You are not without options, and the routes are set out in order on how to report an overcharging locksmith. We are not a locksmith and cannot act for you, but that page names who can.