What a Locksmith Costs in St. Louis (and How to Avoid the Lockout Scam)

Revised August 27, 2026

Imagine it’s 11 p.m. in Maplewood and the door has just clicked shut behind you. Keys on the kitchen counter, phone in your hand, twenty percent battery, and a dog on the other side of the glass who thinks this is fine. You type three words into the phone and get a screen full of results that all promise the same thing: open 24 hours, fifteen minutes away, $19 service call.

Or maybe it’s the calmer version of the same problem. A rental in Florissant where the last tenant never turned in a key. A closing in St. Charles and an envelope of keys from a seller who cannot remember which one opens the side door. A back door in Kirkwood that got kicked shut on a snow day and now turns halfway and stops.

Those are two different purchases wearing one word. One is an emergency you are buying at midnight with no leverage at all. The other is scheduled work you can price on a Tuesday afternoon like any other trade. What follows is how each one actually gets priced, what an honest quote itemizes, and the specific phone call that keeps a $19 advertisement from turning into a number you never agreed to.

How much should locksmiths charge?

A locksmith should charge you a number you agreed to before the van left, built from three visible lines: a service call or trip charge, labor for the actual work, and hardware if any. After-hours and holiday work carries a premium. Anything quoted as a single teaser figure with the rest revealed at your door is not a quote.

There is no defensible single figure for this metro, and any page publishing one is either recycling a national average from somewhere else or selling you something. Price moves with five things: the hour you call, how far the vehicle drives, what the lock actually is, whether the door or frame took damage, and how many cylinders end up in the job.

The hour matters more than people expect. A lockout at 11 p.m. on a Sunday is a callout, a drive across the county, and a technician who is awake because you called. That same lock, rekeyed at two on a Wednesday afternoon, is a scheduled stop between two other scheduled stops. Same skill, same person, completely different product.

So the useful question is never what locksmiths charge in general. It is what this job costs, from this shop, at this address, before anybody gets in a vehicle. That number exists and somebody can say it out loud. Getting it takes about ninety seconds on the phone.

What should a real locksmith quote itemize?

Four lines, and you should hear all four before you agree to anything. The service call or trip charge, which covers getting there. The labor for the work itself. The hardware, if a lock or a cylinder is being installed. And the after-hours rate when it applies, stated as an actual amount rather than a vague warning that nights cost more.

Ask for the all-in total with tax, then ask what would change it. A straight answer sounds like a condition, not a hedge: the number holds unless the door has been forced, unless the cylinder turns out to be high-security, unless we have to drill. A shop that cannot name a single condition has not thought about your job. A shop that names three has done it a thousand times.

Then get it in writing, and a text message counts. Ask the person on the phone to send the quoted total to your number before anyone is dispatched. That one request costs nothing, takes ten seconds, and converts a verbal promise into something you can hold up in a porch light while somebody explains why it is now four times higher.

Two more items belong in the same call. Ask whether the price includes replacing the lock if drilling is required, because a drilled cylinder means new hardware and that is a second charge people never see coming. And ask what payment the shop takes. Cash only, at your door, after midnight, is the oldest tell in this trade.

How does the $19 lockout bait-and-switch work?

It works because the sale, the dispatch and the work are three different parties. You call a number attached to a very low advertised figure. A dispatcher who is not a locksmith, and may not be anywhere near Missouri, takes your address. Someone arrives in an unmarked car, looks at the lock, and announces that this one has to be drilled. The advertised figure covered showing up.

Every piece of that is engineered for the moment you have the least leverage. It is late, you are outside, and your options are the person standing in front of you or starting the whole search over. The pressure is not a side effect of the model. The pressure is the model.

The tells are consistent, and you can check most of them from the sidewalk. A phone number with no business name attached to it. A dispatcher who will not say which company is coming. No local street address anywhere on the listing. A vehicle with no company name on it. A technician with no identification and no invoice. And the price moving after work has started rather than before it.

One more is quieter and catches careful people. A result looks local because it carries a neighborhood name, and the address behind it turns out to be a mailbox, a vacant suite or a parking lot. A shop you could drive to on a Tuesday is a fundamentally different business from a phone number that surfaces only when you are desperate.

How do you price a lockout before anyone is dispatched?

Six questions, in this order, asked while you are standing in the driveway. This is the entire defense, and it works for a boring reason: a call center in another state cannot answer the second and third ones without giving itself away.

One: what is the legal name of the business, and what is the street address? Two: am I talking to the locksmith or to a dispatch service? Three: is the technician an employee or a subcontractor? Four: what is the all-in total for a residential lockout at this address at this hour, trip charge and tax included? Five: what would change that number? Six: will you text me the total before you send anyone?

Then two conditions you set rather than ask. Tell them you will want photo identification and the company name on the invoice when the technician arrives. And tell them plainly that you are not authorizing drilling without a new price agreed to first. Both are completely ordinary requests, and both make a bait-and-switch operation lose interest in your address remarkably fast.

A range is a fine answer and often the honest one. “We cannot say until we see it” on a standard residential lockout is not, so keep calling. The shops willing to commit to a number over the phone tend to be the ones with a sign on a building, a landline and a name they intend to keep using next year.

Unrelated — the best bank for small business checking in St. Louis.

Does Missouri license locksmiths?

Not statewide. Missouri’s Division of Professional Registration oversees roughly forty licensed professions, and locksmith is not one of them. There is no state license to look up, no state exam behind the title, and no state board reviewing complaints about a locksmith’s work. That is precisely why the vetting lands on you, and why the phone call above matters more here than it would in a licensing state.

Across the river the rules are different. Illinois licenses locksmiths under the Private Detective, Private Alarm, Private Security, Fingerprint Vendor, and Locksmith Act of 2004 (225 ILCS 447), administered by the Illinois Department of Financial & Professional Regulation. If the job is in Belleville, Edwardsville or O’Fallon, you can run a name through IDFPR’s free license lookup before anyone drives out.

On the Missouri side, substitute checks that do the same work. Confirm a physical address you can find on a map and, if the job is not urgent, drive past it. Ask for proof of general liability insurance, since somebody is about to work on your door. Then check that three names match: the name on the listing, the name on the invoice, and the name on the vehicle. It is a low bar, and call-center operations fail it constantly.

Address is also the reason a directory listing beats a star rating for this particular trade, because you can compare locksmiths across the St. Louis metro by whether there is a real place behind the phone number. And if it does go wrong, the complaint still has somewhere to go without a licensing board. Missouri’s Merchandising Practices Act, Chapter 407 RSMo, covers deception in connection with the sale of services, and the Missouri Attorney General accepts consumer complaints; Illinois residents file with the Illinois Attorney General. Pay by card rather than cash wherever you can, because a card gives you a dispute path that cash never will.

Is it cheaper to rekey or replace locks?

Rekeying is almost always cheaper, because you are buying labor on hardware you already own. The locksmith pulls the cylinder, changes the pin stacks so a new key works and the old one does not, and puts it back. Nothing gets purchased except pins and keys. Replacing means new hardware on top of the same labor, so by definition it costs more.

Rekey when the locks work fine and the real problem is who has a key. A move-in. A lost keyring. A contractor who never gave one back. A roommate who left on bad terms. It is also how you get a house that opens on a single key, which is a labor line rather than a shopping trip when the locks already share a keyway.

Replace when the hardware itself is the problem. A bolt that binds and needs a shoulder to throw. A cylinder worn loose enough to turn with the wrong key. A knob where a deadbolt belongs. Builder-grade hardware that was chosen because it was cheap in bulk. Replace, too, when the keyway is obsolete or the brand is one nobody stocks pins for anymore.

One caution people discover too late: not every lock can be rekeyed at your door. Restricted and patented high-security cylinders are serviced through authorized dealers, and some inexpensive hardware is not really rebuildable at all. Read the brand off the face of the lock and say it on the phone. It changes the quote and occasionally changes the trade you need.

What’s the average price to change a door lock?

No honest average exists for this metro, and inventing one would be a guess dressed up as research. What is knowable is what moves the number, and there are five levers: hardware grade, whether the door is already bored, how many locks are in the job, whether you want them keyed alike, and when you want the work done.

Hardware grade is the biggest lever and the one you fully control. The ANSI/BHMA A156 standard grades locks 1, 2 and 3, with Grade 1 built for commercial traffic and Grade 3 the basic residential tier. Grade tracks cycle counts and force resistance, and it tracks price right along with them. A deadbolt is graded separately from the knob or lever sitting beside it on the same door.

Volume works in your favor here. The trip charge gets paid once whether the technician changes one lock or six, so a whole-house change in a single visit costs less per door than the same six doors spread across three appointments. If you are moving in, do the front, the back, the side and the garage entry in one booking and ask for them keyed alike.

Then the two questions that decide the labor. Is the door already drilled for what you are installing, or does it need a new bore? And is anything about it non-standard: a steel commercial door, a mortise lock in an older brick two-family, a storm door in the way, a jamb that has shifted. Say all of that on the phone and the quote you get back will survive contact with the actual door.

How much does a handyman charge to replace door locks?

Usually less per hour than a locksmith, and the comparison that matters is scope rather than rate. A handyman installs the lock you bought. A locksmith can rekey a cylinder, key four doors alike, originate a key when there is no original, and open a lock without wrecking it. If your job is unboxing a deadbolt and driving screws, the cheaper trade really is cheaper.

The line moves the moment anything is not standard. Boring a door that has never had a deadbolt. A strike that will not line up. An old mortise body. Any request to make two different locks open on one key. That is locksmith work, and paying a handyman rate for it usually turns into two trips and both bills.

Whoever you hire, the vetting is identical. Missouri has no statewide locksmith license and no statewide handyman license either; registration requirements for general repair work are set locally rather than by the state, so ask your own municipality what it wants to see. Proof of liability insurance and a written scope are worth more than any title printed on a business card.

Can I replace a door lock myself?

Often yes, on a standard residential door that is already bored. Modern deadbolts and knobsets are built for it: two screws through the cylinder, a bolt assembly in the edge of the door, a strike plate on the jamb. If the new lock matches what came out, it is a fifteen-minute job and the only tool required is a screwdriver.

Measure before you buy, because two numbers decide whether the box on the shelf will fit. Backset is the distance from the edge of the door to the center of the bore, and residential doors are normally 2-3/8 or 2-3/4 inches. The bore itself is usually 2-1/8 inches, with a 1-inch hole through the edge of the door. Most retail locks ship with an adjustable latch that handles either backset.

While the plate is off, do the upgrade that costs almost nothing: swap the short strike-plate screws for three-inch screws that reach through the jamb and bite into the framing behind it. A kicked door almost never fails at the lock. It fails at the jamb. That is arguably the highest-value ten minutes in this entire article, and it works on hardware you already own.

Call somebody when the door needs a new bore, when the existing hardware is mortise, when the door is steel or fire-rated, when the strike will not align because the frame has moved, or when you want several doors running on one key. Cutting a spare is a separate errand entirely, and it is counter work at most St. Louis hardware stores, right up to the point where the blank is restricted.

Can I get my locks changed for free?

Rarely, and it is worth understanding the four situations where somebody else pays, because none of them involve a locksmith working for nothing. Free lock work almost always means the cost has moved onto a landlord, a builder, an insurer or a program. It has not evaporated. Knowing which one applies to you is the difference between asking and paying.

If you rent, read the lease before you call anyone. The lock is the landlord’s hardware, and many leases require written permission plus a copy of any new key. Ask in writing, keep the reply, and ask directly who pays. A landlord who already rekeys between tenants as standard policy has answered the whole question for you before you spend a dollar.

If you just bought the house, check the closing packet, because a rekey is sometimes included by the builder or bundled into a first-year warranty plan. If your keys were stolen or the house was broken into, read the homeowners or renters policy: lock replacement is covered on some policies, sits under a deductible that makes a claim pointless on others, and the policy is the only thing that can tell you which. And if you are changing locks for personal-safety reasons, ask a local victim-services agency what assistance it offers, since several help with exactly this.

What is genuinely free is the diagnosis. Any locksmith worth hiring will tell you over the phone whether your situation is a rekey or a replacement, and will do it without dispatching anybody or charging for the conversation. If the lock change is really the first move in a bigger decision about doors, sensors and monitoring, what a home security system actually includes covers the wider version of the same question.

What this looks like from the other side of the van

A locksmith sells drive time and tooling, not parts. The revenue is billable hours in a metro that sprawls across two states, and the cost that quietly eats the day is the unbillable driving between them: a call in Hazelwood, the next one in Webster Groves, forty minutes of fuel and no invoice in between. Add the tooling. Key machines, code software, pinning kits, transponder and fob programmers, and a parts inventory deep enough to finish a job on the first visit rather than the third.

That is also why the after-hours premium is not greed. It is a person leaving their house at 1 a.m., and a shop that pays for someone to be reachable at all. The real competitive problem for an established operator is not the shop across town, it is the lead-generation network bidding on the same search terms with no building, no payroll and no address to defend. A shop with a lease pays more for the same click and then gets compared to a fake $19 quote. Being findable somewhere the address is checkable is most of the answer, which is what a listing on St Louis Near Me Directory is for; owners can claim theirs in about ten minutes.

Frequently asked questions

How much should locksmiths charge?

A locksmith should charge a number you agreed to before the vehicle left, itemized as a service call or trip charge, labor, hardware if any is installed, and a stated after-hours rate when it applies. Ask for the all-in total including tax, ask what would change it, and ask for it in a text message. A single teaser figure with everything else revealed at your door is not a quote.

Is it cheaper to rekey or replace locks?

Rekeying is cheaper nearly every time, because it is labor on hardware you already own: the pin stacks change, the old key stops working, nothing is purchased but pins and keys. Replace when the hardware itself is worn, binding, obsolete or the wrong type for the door. Restricted and high-security cylinders are the exception, since those are serviced through authorized dealers.

What’s the average price to change a door lock?

No reliable average exists for the St. Louis metro, and any single figure published for it is a guess. Five things move the price: the ANSI/BHMA grade of the hardware, whether the door is already bored, how many locks are in the job, whether you want them keyed alike, and the time of day. Doing every exterior door in one visit spreads the trip charge across all of them.

How much does a handyman charge to replace door locks?

Generally a lower hourly rate than a locksmith, which is genuinely cheaper when the job is installing hardware you already bought on a door that is already drilled. It stops being cheaper the moment the work needs a new bore, an old mortise body, a misaligned strike, or several doors keyed alike. Ask for proof of liability insurance and a written scope either way.

Can I replace a door lock myself?

Usually, on a standard residential door with an existing bore. Check two measurements first: backset, normally 2-3/8 or 2-3/4 inches from the door edge to the center of the bore, and the bore itself, usually 2-1/8 inches. While the strike plate is off, replace the short screws with three-inch screws that reach the framing. Call a professional for new bores, mortise hardware, steel doors or keyed-alike work.

Can a handyman install a door lock?

Yes, and on a standard pre-bored door it is routine handyman work. What a handyman typically cannot do is rekey a cylinder, key several doors alike, originate a key when no original exists, or open a locked door without damaging it. Confirm who is buying the hardware, confirm liability insurance, and get the scope in writing before the work starts.

Can I get my locks changed for free?

Occasionally, though it means someone else is paying rather than the work being free. Renters should check the lease, since the lock is the landlord’s hardware and many landlords rekey between tenants. New buyers should check the closing packet and any first-year warranty. After a theft or break-in, read the homeowners or renters policy. The phone diagnosis, at least, should always cost nothing.

About the Author: The St Louis Near Me Directory Team
Written by a dedicated team of St. Louis locals who live, work, and play right here in the St. Louis metro. Founder Lane Forman and team are committed to building the region’s most trusted directory by verifying listings and connecting local businesses with loyal customers across Missouri and Illinois.

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