Data last verified: 2 October 2026. Figures re-checked against their primary sources under the Whito rolling re-verification programme.
Finding
43 of the 70 UK locksmith websites that publish any emergency price said only no call-out charge on 2 October 2026; the median published price is £0.
Source: Whito, whito.co.uk/locksmiths/research/emergency-locksmith-callout-prices, 2026-10-02. Free to quote with a link to this page.
Last Updated on October 2, 2026
Read: 2 October 2026. 139 locksmith websites across eight UK towns. Every price taken from the firm’s own site on that day, nothing from directories. Same method and towns as our plumber and electrician call-out studies.
Locked out, phone in hand, you will find more prices for locksmiths than for any other emergency trade. Half the websites we checked publish something. Read what they publish carefully, because the commonest published price is £0, and £0 is not what you will pay.
On 2 October 2026 we checked 139 emergency locksmith websites across eight UK towns. 70 of 139 published something, the highest share of the three trades we have measured. But 43 of those 70 published only “no call-out charge”, with no figure for the work. Just 27 of 139 published a figure in pounds, from £39 to £100 for an emergency lockout or attendance.
What we checked
One job, defined once: the emergency locksmith call-out price, as published on the firm’s own website. Where a firm leads with a lockout price instead of a call-out fee, we recorded that, with the unit stated. A “from” price is not a fixed price, and we recorded which it is. An explicit “no call-out charge” is a published fact, recorded as £0. It means no attendance fee. The labour that gets you back inside is still charged, usually at a rate the same page does not publish.
Towns: Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Belfast and Norwich. A firm counts as checked only if we opened its own site looking for a price. Prices on directories and aggregators were ignored.
What is published, town by town
| Town | Firms checked | Publish anything | No price on site | “No call-out charge” | Figures in pounds |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Belfast | 23 | 8 | 15 | 4 | 4 (£59 to £90) |
| Birmingham | 24 | 8 | 16 | 5 | 3 (£45 to £90) |
| Bristol | 15 | 12 | 3 | 7 | 5 (£39 to £100) |
| Cardiff | 18 | 9 | 9 | 6 | 3 (£60 to £95) |
| Glasgow | 9 | 6 | 3 | 5 | 1 (£59) |
| Leeds | 17 | 9 | 8 | 5 | 4 (£59 to £69) |
| Manchester | 17 | 14 | 3 | 8 | 6 (£39 to £79) |
| Norwich | 16 | 4 | 12 | 3 | 1 (£75) |
| All towns | 139 | 70 | 69 | 43 | 27 (£39 to £100) |
We show a median only where a town produced eight or more published prices, counting the £0 entries. On that rule the median published price is £0 in Manchester (14 prices), Bristol (12), Leeds (9), Cardiff (9) and Birmingham (8), and £29.50 in Belfast (8). Across all 70 published prices the median is £0. That is the locksmith market in one number: the price most often put in writing is the one for turning up, not the one for the work.
What “no call-out charge” means at your front door
43 of the 70 publishing firms say “no call-out charge” and almost all stop there. The fee for attending is zero; the labour, the lock and the out-of-hours uplift are quoted once the van is outside. If the firm you call publishes £0 and nothing else, the real price conversation has not started yet. Have it on the phone, not at the door.
Reading the figures that do exist
21 of the 70 published prices are “from” prices, the highest share of the three trades. The lowest advertised floors, £39 to £59, come mostly from multi-town dispatch brands whose pages are written per city; the ranges behind those floors run as high as £250 on the same pages. Town-anchored firms that publish figures tend to state £75 to £105 for a standard lockout, and the clearest pages publish the whole job menu: standard opening, destructive opening, lock replacement, each with its own figure and a plain line on VAT. 54 of 70 published prices do not state VAT at all.
Companies House matching tells its own story: only 13 of the 70 price-publishing firms matched unambiguously, the lowest rate of the three trades. Locksmithing is a market of generic trading names, sole traders and multi-town brands, which is exactly when a written price before the van moves matters most. A match is a registry fact, not a quality judgement, and an unmatched firm is not an unregistered one.
Hiring in a lockout: agree four things on the phone
The attendance fee, if any. The price for a non-destructive opening, and what happens to the price if the lock has to be drilled. Whether a replacement lock is included or extra, and at what price. Whether all of that includes VAT. A firm that answers all four before travelling has told you more than most publish.
If you run a locksmith business
Your market already publishes more than any other emergency trade, so a bare “no call-out charge” no longer stands out. What remains rare is a fixed, VAT-stated lockout price: only 3 of the 70 publishing firms state a fixed figure with its VAT treatment. That is the gap. More on marketing a locksmith business: Whito for locksmiths.
What this does not prove
- A published price is not the invoiced price. The final bill depends on the lock, the hour, parts and any drilling.
- This is a small sample: 139 firms found through open web search, which favours firms that are visible in search. It is not a census of any town’s locksmiths.
- Pages change. Every figure carries its retrieval date, 2 October 2026, and may be wrong a week later.
- A Companies House match is not a quality judgement, and an unmatched firm is not an unregistered one. A registry outage during collection is noted in the affected rows of the data file.
- £0 means no attendance fee is advertised. Labour and parts are still charged.
- The figures mix call-out fees, lockout prices and hourly rates. The unit column in the data file governs every comparison.
- Several multi-town brands appear in more than one town, sometimes under different names; the notes column records the operator where the firm’s own site names it.
- Saved evidence pages are text renderings fetched by tool, not raw HTML archives.
How we did it
Collection date 2 October 2026. We searched openly for locksmiths serving each town, opened their own websites, and recorded a price only from a page we opened, together with the exact sentence it came from. Every price was fetched twice, and every recorded quote was machine-checked against its saved page before this page was written. Firms publishing nothing were logged as checked with no price. Nothing is ranked, no firm is named as cheapest or best, and the data file lists firms alphabetically within town. If you think a figure is wrong, use corrections.
The data behind this page
The firm-level file behind this page covers the 70 firms with a published price: URL, the price, its unit, VAT treatment, fixed or from, the verbatim sentence it came from, the retrieval date and the Companies House fields, plus the register of all 69 checked firms with no published price. It is sold as Whito Data. Nobody can pay to be added to a study, removed from one or moved within one. How Whito makes money.
Cite this research
Whito Research (2026). Emergency locksmith call-out prices: of 139 UK firm websites checked on 2 October 2026, 43 of the 70 that publish anything say only “no call-out charge”, and the median published price is £0. https://whito.co.uk/locksmiths/research/emergency-locksmith-callout-prices/
These figures are free to quote with a link to this page.
- Emergency plumber call-out prices: what 179 UK firms actually publish
- Emergency electrician call-out prices: what 135 UK firms actually publish
Questions
How much does an emergency locksmith cost in the UK?
Published figures for an emergency lockout ran from £39 to £100 across 27 of 139 firm websites checked on 2 October 2026, with the lowest “from” floors on multi-town brands and town-anchored firms more often at £75 to £105. Most firms publish either nothing or only “no call-out charge”. Source: Whito, firm websites read 2 October 2026.
Is “no call-out charge” a good deal?
It is not a price. It means no attendance fee; the labour, the lock and any out-of-hours uplift are still charged. In this study 43 of the 70 firms publishing anything said “no call-out charge”, and the median published price across all 70 was £0. Agree the lockout price on the phone. Source: Whito, firm websites read 2 October 2026.
What should I agree before a locksmith travels?
Four things: the attendance fee, if any; the non-destructive opening price and what drilling changes; whether a replacement lock is included and at what price; and whether it all includes VAT. In this study 54 of 70 published prices did not state VAT. Source: Whito, firm websites read 2 October 2026.
If your business is named here and you think we have a fact wrong, email hello@whito.co.uk and we will check it and correct it. If you want to respond, send us a statement and we will publish it alongside. Full detail: Corrections, right of reply and removals.
