How much does a locksmith cost?

There is no locksmith's hourly rate in the Economic Census, because it publishes no hours for this whole sector. So this page does not predict a price. It checks the one you were given, against the only benchmark that can be built.

And before you call anyone, the most useful fact about this trade: 83% of what locksmiths sell has a building, a shop counter or a safe as its subject. The industry is 63.1% fitting and repairing door hardware and security systems, 14.9% cutting keys, and the rest is retail hardware, safes and alarm monitoring. Now the part that should worry you: across all 7,120 product codes in the entire Economic Census there is no category for a LOCKOUT. Not for a car, not for a house. The emergency almost everyone reading this is having is not a thing the federal statistics count, which is exactly why nobody can quote you an average price for it, and why the ones you have read are made up.

§ 01 Your numbers

Change anything. The answer updates as you type.

What you were quoted (or charged)

The whole figure, including any call-out fee. This is the number the page checks.

If you were given a range, put in the top of it: that is the one you will be asked to pay. If the job is already done, put in what you actually paid, and the page will tell you what rate you paid without being told it.

Minutes they were with you

Actual time working on your lock or your car. For a car lockout this is usually short: the skill is in the speed.

Do not feel clever about a low number here. A job that takes five minutes takes five minutes BECAUSE the person is good at it, and paying for the twenty years rather than the five minutes is how every skilled trade works. The point of this page is not that fast work should be cheap. It is that you should know what rate you are paying.

Minutes they spent getting to you

Their travel time, both ways if you can estimate it. It is real time on their payroll, and your job is what pays for it.

This is the box that makes the comparison fair, and most 'locksmith prices' articles pretend it does not exist. A lockout call is mostly driving. The industry benchmark below already includes drive time, because it is revenue over ALL paid staff hours, so leaving your drive time out would compare an unfair number against a fair one.

People they sent

Almost always one. If two came, they are both on the payroll for the whole trip.

The industry benchmark is revenue per hour of ONE employee's time, so two people for an hour is two employee-hours, and your job has to cover both.

The industry benchmark, per employee-hour

$72.67 is what the average locksmith business takes in per hour of somebody being on its payroll. It is not a billed rate: no billed rate exists.

The 2022 Economic Census: $2,626,866,000 of receipts across 17,378 employees, which is $151,160 per employee per year. Divided by a 2,080-hour year, that is $72.67 an hour. THE 2,080 IS OURS, not a statistic: the Census publishes no hours for this sector, which is the entire reason no rate exists, so we had to supply the number and we are telling you we did. It also includes the trade's retail sales, which are 12.8% of receipts, so it is not purely a service figure.

What your job pays them an hour

$180

What you were quoted$150
What the industry averages over 0.83 employee-hours$61

See next steps →

There is no category for a lockout anywhere in the Economic Census. Across all 7,120 product codes it collects, there is no line for opening a locked car and none for opening a locked door. The emergency you are almost certainly having is not a thing the federal statistics count. That is why nobody can honestly quote you an average price for it, and it is why the averages you have read are invented.

What the trade IS, and this needs no guesswork. 83% of what locksmiths sell has a building, a shop counter or a safe as its subject: 63.1% is fitting and repairing door hardware and security systems, 12.8% is selling hardware over a counter, 4.6% is safes, and the rest is alarm monitoring. Every one of those cells is published, so that figure needs no assumption about what the Census is hiding. The remainder is mostly key duplication (14.9%), and the Census does not say how much of that is CAR keys, because it has no code for car keys. We published a number here and it was wrong, so here is what happened. Our first draft told you that car work is "between 0.5% and 1.6% of the trade". We built that from the one product line with the word "vehicle" in its label, and it was wrong three ways at once: it bounds lines LABELLED vehicle rather than car WORK, which is not counted anywhere; car keys have nowhere to live except inside the key-duplication line we were showing you as evidence AGAINST cars; and the line we leaned on carries a sampling error of 44.6%, so it was never a floor. We have withdrawn the number rather than soften it. What survives is the 83%, and the fact that your emergency is not a category at all. Why there is no hourly rate, and it is not laziness. A rate is receipts divided by hours. The construction census counts worker-hours, which is why this site can tell you exactly what an electrician's firm bills. The SERVICES census does not: open the file and the columns are firms, establishments, receipts, payroll and employees, with no hours column for any industry in the sector. And here is a second thing we got wrong and are not going to hide. We first wrote that no federal source publishes hours for this trade at all. That is false. BLS's Current Employment Statistics publishes average weekly hours for the industry GROUP that contains locksmiths, and has for years. It does not go down to locksmiths themselves, and the group it does publish is dominated by a different industry (security systems services), so a locksmith's rate still cannot be built from it. The narrow claim survives. The sweeping one did not, and it was the eleventh time this site has announced an absence after looking in one file. The consolation is that it corroborates us. We had to assume a working year to build the benchmark, and we called the 2,080 hours ours, which it is. BLS says the industry group works about 2,050 hours a year. Our assumption, confirmed to within one and a half percent by the source we had told you did not exist. So we built the only benchmark that can be built. $2,626,866,000 of receipts across 17,378 employees is $151,160 per employee per year, and at a 2,080-hour year that is $72.67 of revenue per hour of employee time. That hour already includes the driving, the waiting and the phone. It is not a billed rate. It is what the average locksmith business actually takes in per hour of somebody being on the payroll, and your quote has to cover exactly the same things. A quote above it is not proof of a rip-off, and we will not tell you it is. Emergency work is genuinely dearer than routine work. A lockout is nearly all drive time. Someone answered the phone at midnight. What the number gives you is the right question to ask, which is: for the hour of their time this took, does the price make sense?

§ 02 The return

Your job, per hour of their time$180.00

Employee-hours your job actually costs them0.83

What the industry averages over those hours$61

Your quote, as a multiple of the industry average2.48

The industry's receipts, employees and product mix are the Census's. The wage is BLS's. The 2,080-hour year is OURS, and it exists only because the Census publishes no hours for this sector, which is the same reason no locksmith hourly rate exists anywhere. Everything you type stays yours.

By the numbers

The Economic Census has no category for a lockout. Across all 7,120 product codes it collects, there is no line for opening a locked car, and none for opening a locked door.
More
Nor is there a code for automotive key cutting or transponder programming. So the emergency almost everyone reading this is having is simply not a thing the federal statistics count, and any 'average lockout price' is somebody's estimate rather than a measurement. We could have estimated one too. We would rather tell you the category does not exist.
83% of what locksmiths sell has a building, a shop counter or a safe as its subject. The trade is 63.1% door hardware and security systems, 12.8% retail, 4.6% safes.
More
Every cell in that 83% is published, so the figure needs no assumption about what the Census is withholding. The rest is mostly key duplication (14.9%), and the Census does not say how much of that is car keys, because it has no code for them. The industry the statistics describe is a building trade, and the averages you have read are describing it, not you.
There is no locksmith's hourly rate in the Economic Census, and the reason is a missing column, not a missing effort.
More
A rate is receipts over hours. The construction census counts worker-hours, which is why this site can tell you what an electrician's firm bills per hour. The services census has no hours column at all: firms, establishments, receipts, payroll, employees. BLS does publish hours for the industry GROUP that contains locksmiths, and we wrongly said it did not; but that group is dominated by security systems services, so its hours are not a locksmith's hours and a locksmith-specific rate still cannot be built.
The average locksmith business takes in $72.67 per hour of employee time, and that hour already includes the driving and the waiting.
More
$2,626,866,000 of receipts across 17,378 employees is $151,160 each per year; at a 2,080-hour year that is $72.67. The 2,080 is OURS. It is not a billed rate and no billed rate exists, but it is the right thing to hold a quote against, because a quote has to cover the drive time and the phone too.
A locksmith earns a median of $24.68 an hour, and the middle 80% earn between $17.08 and $38.17.
More
BLS surveys the occupation directly (49-9094, Locksmiths and Safe Repairers, 15,040 of them), so this needs no industry class and is exact. The mean is $26.67 and the mean annual wage is $55,470.
This is a trade of very small businesses: 3,983 establishments run by 3,895 firms, averaging 4.4 employees each.
More
Almost every locksmith firm is a single establishment. There is essentially no chain structure in this industry, which is worth knowing when a national-sounding call centre answers your emergency.

Sourced: the industry's receipts, employees, establishments and payroll, from the 2022 Economic Census (NAICS 561622, "Locksmiths"). What the trade sells, from the Census product file. The wage, from BLS. Ours: the 2,080-hour year, which we had to supply because the Census publishes none, and which is a box you can change.

What we refuse to do. Invent an hourly rate. There is no locksmith's billed rate in the federal statistics and we are not going to manufacture one and let it wear the Census's clothes. The number this page gives you is revenue per hour of EMPLOYEE time, and it is a different thing from a billed rate: it is what the business takes in across every paid hour, billable or not. What that benchmark is not. It includes the trade's RETAIL sales, which are 12.8% of receipts, so it is not purely a service figure. It assumes a 2,080-hour year for every employee, which is ours. And it is an average across 3,983 establishments, so it does not bound the firm you called: a class average never does. The class is clean, which is unusual and worth saying. NAICS 561622 is literally "Locksmiths". It is not a bucket with a locksmith in the corner, the way the plumbing class is 40.9% heating engineers. So when we say the industry is 63.1% building work, that is the locksmith industry, not a mixed class we are hoping is close enough. Two agencies, and we made them argue. The Census counts 17,378 people employed in locksmith establishments. BLS counts 15,040 people doing the JOB of locksmith, wherever they work. Those are different questions and they should not match exactly: the Census figure includes the person answering the phone, and the BLS figure includes locksmiths employed by firms that are not locksmith businesses. They are 1.16x apart, which is the corroboration we wanted. The puller refuses to build the file if they ever drift outside 0.7x to 1.6x.

Where every number above comes from

Wage data

BLS, Current Employment Statistics, series CEU6056162002: average weekly hours, NAICS 56162 (security systems services), 2006 to 2026. WE CITE THIS BECAUSE IT IS THE SERIES THAT WOULD DISPROVE US IF WE OVERSTATED THE ABSENCE, AND IT NEARLY DID. The Economic Census publishes no hours for sector 56, which is true. We once turned that into 'no hours exist', which was false: CES publishes them for the GROUP. It stops at 56162, a bucket holding both security systems services and locksmiths, and security systems is much the larger, so we will not call its hours a locksmith's hours (Rule 22). The locksmith-only series, CEU6056162202, genuinely returns no data. So a locksmith-SPECIFIC hourly rate still cannot be built, and our 2,080-hour year remains OURS. But CES says the group works 39.4 hours a week, which is 2,050 hours a year: our assumption corroborated to within 1.5% by a federal source we had told readers did not exist
download.bls.gov
US Census

Census, 2022 Economic Census, sector 56 (EC2256BASIC): receipts, establishments, payroll and employment for NAICS 561622 Locksmiths. Publishes NO hours, which is why no hourly rate exists
www2.census.gov
US Census

Census, 2022 Economic Census, product lines by industry (EC2200NAPCSINDPRD): what locksmiths actually sell. Its 7,120 product codes contain no category for a lockout, of a car or of a building
www2.census.gov
Wage data

BLS, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025: 49-9094 Locksmiths and Safe Repairers
bls.gov

What this assumes, and where it could be wrong

Every one of these is a place the number could be off. They are here because you should be able to check our working, not because we are hedging.

There is no billed rate here, and the benchmark is a different thing from one.

Revenue per employee-hour is what the business TAKES IN per paid staff hour, billable or not. A billed rate is what it charges for an hour of work. The first can be computed from what the Census publishes; the second cannot, for this sector, at all.

The 2,080-hour year is OURS, and BLS corroborates it to within one and a half percent.

The Economic Census publishes no hours for this sector, so we had to supply a working year: 2,080 is a full-time one. BLS's CES puts the industry group that contains locksmiths at about 39.4 hours a week, which is 2,050 hours a year. We do not use that figure directly, because the group is dominated by security systems services rather than locksmiths and a bucket is not a job. But it means our assumption is not a guess in the dark. Change it in the box and the benchmark moves.

The benchmark includes retail sales, so it is not purely a service figure.

12.8% of the industry's receipts are retail sales of hardware and supplies, and 4.6% are safes and vaults. Those dollars are in the numerator alongside the service work.

We publish no figure for how much of the trade is car work, and we did publish one, and it was wrong.

The first version of this page said 0.5% to 1.6%, built from the only product line with 'vehicle' in its label. That bounds lines LABELLED vehicle, not car work, which NAPCS does not count anywhere; car keys can only be inside the key-duplication line, which we were citing as evidence against cars; and the line carried a 44.6% sampling error. Withdrawn rather than softened. What survives is the 83% whose subject is definitively not a car, and it is built from published cells alone.

It is a class average, so it does not bound the firm you called.

3,983 establishments. An average across them says nothing that must be true of any one of them, and a quote above it is information rather than proof.

Frequently asked questions

How much does a locksmith cost?

Not from federal data, and this page is the explanation rather than a workaround. A rate is receipts divided by hours, and the services census publishes no hours: not for locksmiths, not for any industry in the sector. BLS does publish hours for the industry group that contains locksmiths, but that group is mostly a different industry, so its hours are not a locksmith's hours. Either way there is no denominator that is actually about locksmiths, and so there is no rate. What we can give you is the benchmark that does exist. The average locksmith business takes in $72.67 per hour of employee time, and that hour already includes the driving, the waiting and the phone. Put your quote and the time it took into the boxes above and the page will tell you what rate you are actually paying, and how it compares.

How much should it cost to unlock my car?

Nobody can tell you honestly, and the reason is worth a minute. The Economic Census counts 7,120 different products and services, and not one of them is a lockout. There is no code for opening a locked car, no code for opening a locked door, no code for cutting a car key. Your emergency is not a category. Meanwhile 83% of what locksmiths sell has a building, a shop counter or a safe as its subject, so the 'average locksmith prices' you have read are describing a building trade, and they are not about you. For your own job, the honest approach is the one this page takes: work out how much of somebody's time you are buying, including their drive to you, and see what rate your quote works out at. A lockout is nearly all drive time, which is why a five-minute job is not a five-minute price, and should not be.

I was quoted a lot more than the benchmark. Am I being ripped off?

Not necessarily, and we are not going to sell you a grievance. $72.67 is an industry average across nearly four thousand businesses, and an average never bounds any one of them. Emergency work is genuinely dearer than routine work. Somebody answered the phone at midnight, drove to you, and carried the tools and the insurance to do it. What the number gives you is the right question rather than the answer: for the hour or so of their time this actually took, does the price make sense? If your quote works out at four or five times the industry average per hour of their time, that is worth asking about before they start, and asking before is much easier than asking after.

Why can you give an electrician's hourly rate but not a locksmith's?

Because the construction census counts hours and the services census does not. It is that mechanical. For an electrician, the Census publishes the receipts AND the construction-worker hours, so a billed rate falls straight out: $111.55 per worker-hour. For a locksmith it publishes the receipts, the payroll and the head count, and no hours anywhere in the file. We could invent an hours figure and produce a rate that looked exactly as authoritative, and every other page on the internet effectively does. We would rather show you the join.

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