How Much is a Gateshead Locksmith?

How Much do Locksmiths Charge Per Hour? |  How much is it for a locksmith to unlock your house? | Gateshead | Tyne and Wear

 

All locksmiths are different, some charge £85 - £95 per hour in the Tyne and Wear area.

Gateshead Locksmith Service (Taylors Locksmiths) are part of the Guild of Master Locksmiths which means each guild members pricing is the same. We charge £54.99 for the majority of residential work as a flat labour fee or if there are multiple hours then we will give a price based on the job rather than a hourly rate. We charge £54.99 for dealing with wood doors as we can be on for a number of hours, the price included our labour, any wood fillers, wood, paint, varnish and any sundries we need to fit or replace the hardware. The only thing on top would be the physical parts such as a new British Standard lock which would be between £20 - £30 depending on which lock you choose from our large range of hardware. 

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How much is a locksmith callout? | No Call Out Fee | Gateshead Locksmith Service | Gateshead | Tyne and Wear 

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Locksmith call out fees tend to depend on the situation. However Gateshead Locksmith Service (Taylors Locksmiths) do NOT charge any call out fees!

Most locksmiths will charge a hidden fee of £100 to £150 and if its at night you can expect double time at £190 per hour on top as they also charge double rate of labour per hour!!!. 

 

If Gateshead Locksmith Service was to use a call out fee we would always advise before we attended the job. This could be due to it been thick snow, dangerous conditions such as a black ice or late at night such as 2am when we are fast a sleep with our first jobs in at 6am. Its hardly fair to call a locksmith at 2am and expect them to get out of bed, get dressed and open up a shop to get all the tools and then attend a job in the middle of the night. Baring in mind the damage it does to family life, social life etc. So the public should not complain when you have called a locksmith away from his daughters birthday to attend your lock out or from a night out where he cant have a beer in case the phone rings and the phone can go at ant time, at your child's birthday, during the anniversary dinner or a typical one is call pouts on Christmas day which happens each year. It is only far the customer expects to pay more for such a service! However, it should also be a fair amount to pay. That's why Taylors Locksmiths DO NOT USE A CALLL OUT CHARGE! But Taylors do use a standard rate of labour at £54.99 for residential, time and half after 5pm till 10pm and double rate of pay from 10pm till 9am when we open back up for work.

 

However you should be aware of scam locksmiths who charge a call out fee every time, day or night. A real locksmith will not charge a call out fee if it is during normal working hours such as 9am till 5pm, Monday to Friday. Even after that it would probably be around £25 call out between 5pm - 10pm and then £50 call out from 10pm till Midnight. From Midnight till 6am it could be as high as £100. However also watch the labour as some locksmiths will charge time and a half, double time on top of the call out fee per hour. So if they charge £90 per hour labour then you may double that £90 fee on top of a £100 call out fee and they could be there a number of hours and then you will have parts on top of that and if they are charging that kind of money expect to pay £90 - £120 for a new lock that we would normally charge £25 for. Often these companies wont do the parts at cost price the way we do at Taylors. Cost price is what we buy it for from the wholesaler including any other costs such as fuel, admin etc. Lets say a UPVC door lock costs us to buy from our wholesaler around £15 then we will retail that lock at around £18 and that should cover the cost of the part, admin, fuel etc. This means that Taylors make no profit on parts. However the bad locksmiths out there will buy that for £15 and sell it for £60 retail. However its not just bad locksmiths but also shops like B&Q who buy locks wholesale at around £2 per unit and retail them for £49.99 each. It is often cheaper to use a locksmith service like Taylors Locksmiths as we will also keep the pricing low plus we have many offers such as a free door service worth £29.99 for each lock change. Free spare key worth £7.99. 

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Other Reasons Locksmiths can Cost So Much Money!

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Many locksmiths may only do 2 or two jobs per day, if you worked that out over a week the cost of doing the job in many ways is simply not worth it and many locksmiths find alternative work to pay the bills. This means the locksmith service would vanish from Britain, but due to the love of the job many of us push past that. Locksmithing is not a lucrative occupation for many and then we have stiff competition for all work with criminals often finding ways to con people out of money which also effects the industry especially on social media sites like facebook when people ask for a recommended locksmith service, some of these people use multiple accounts and they also buy fake online reviews on Google and facebook. Often if a locksmith has a few hundred reviews they are generally bought reviews or fake. Actually getting real reviews is quite hard. How often do you buy things and never reviews them? These locksmiths are the ones who will charge a vast sum of money for very little work. Often they will strip your door of its parts, then give you a cost of £600 for a job that should be no more than £200 and then when you refuse they leave with door wide open and in bits on the floor or worst case they say they will have to price up the part, take the main component and leave then call with a ridicules price and when you refuse they never return with the part leaving you in a situation where it will cost even more as the next locksmith has no parts to go off for sizing and this takes longer which means more labour costs! 

 

People who chose to pay there bills late means that we have to spend more money paying hourly rates to chase late paying customers which eventually results in higher costs for you the client! 

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Fuel pricing effects our costs, van insurance, shop overheads, rates, storage facility rates and costs, the behind the scenes office work is a 24 hour job with a staffed phoneline, the price of parts and so much more effects how much a locksmith may charge. 

 

In 2017 a euro profile lock would cost us £2.50 to by, we added our costs, fuel, hourly rates of acquiring such a part, delivery costs and that made that locks price, set at £7. That same lock in 2022 due to inflation, Brexit, Pandemics cost us now £18 to £22 for that exact same lock to buy that exact same lock at cost price meaning it now retails for over £30 and this has effected parts in all areas, from wood to trims, glass to locks and so on. However that same lock would cost you around £69.99 or more in large hardware shops!

 

One thing the customer never takes into consideration is the cost of becoming a locksmith. Before we start making a penny we have to outlay around £80k for a full business setup, that's a the cost a of a van, over £35k in tools and key machines, the price of all raining is around £10k and that's before we have even paid for insurance, phones, websites, paid adds, printing, workwear. So this means that all locksmiths have to make this money back before they even turn a profit. Yes we may net £4k in a month but our take home pay is around £900 to £1200per month, the rest vanishes on parts, fuel and all other business costs, adverting and so on. 

 

Locksmithing is a skill and you are also paying for this skill, In many cases to become  skilled locksmiths takes daily practice behind the tools often resulting in deformities in the fingers and hands and it takes a daily practice of around 10 years to become a skilled master locksmith. So you do need take all of this into account. If you want a handy man to break open your door, cost you a new door then ring a handy man not a locksmith. That's the equivalent of asking the hospital janitor to perform you open heart surgery, so good luck with that. 

 

Below I have gave some pricing so you can see a rough idea of charges!