Locksmith Services

The honest answer: it depends on the lock, the hour, and whether the door can be opened without drilling. A standard cylindrical lock on an apartment door at 2pm is the low end; a high-security mortise cylinder on a steel door at 3am is the high end. The $19–$39 quotes you see online are bait — the price is invented at your door once the tech claims the lock 'must be drilled.' We quote a realistic range on the phone, confirm the exact number in person before starting, and we pick or bypass before drilling is ever discussed. Any drilling is explained and approved by you first, with the replacement cylinder included in the quote.

In most NYC co-ops the answer is yes you can change the lock, but the proprietary lease usually requires the corporation to hold a key or that your lock be openable in an emergency — check your house rules before assuming otherwise. Many boards also restrict what you can mount on the corridor-facing side of the door for uniformity, and fire-rated apartment entry doors limit what hardware can legally be installed. The common path is rekeying the existing mortise hardware and giving the managing agent the new key, which keeps you compliant while making sure the previous owner's keys are dead. We do this daily in Brooklyn Heights and can work within whatever your board's alteration rules require.

Your lease governs this, and most NYC leases require you to provide the landlord a copy of any new key so they can access the unit in an emergency — landlords are also generally entitled to access with notice under NYC housing rules. What you cannot be forced to accept is old tenants or unknown parties holding working keys; rekeying after move-in is reasonable and standard. The clean approach: rekey the cylinder, keep the same hardware so nothing about the door changes, and hand the landlord one copy. If a lock is failing and the landlord won't act, document it — a functioning entry lock is part of the warranty of habitability.

Fast — we cut in-house. There's an Xhorse automatic key-cutting machine at both 170 Hicks St and 232 Leonard St, so standard residential, mortise, and most commercial keys are cut in minutes rather than sent out. Restricted keys — Mul-T-Lock and other patent-protected keyways — are different: those require the key's control card or proof of authorization, and duplication happens only for the verified keyholder. That restriction is the entire point of a restricted system, so no shop that takes it seriously will cut one for whoever shows up with the key.

Usually not. On mortise locks this is most often a worn cam, a failed spring or hub inside the case, or a cylinder set screw that backed out and let the cylinder rotate — all repairable without replacing the visible hardware. On older brownstone doors the door itself has often sagged so the bolt binds against the strike, which is an alignment fix, not a lock fix. We open the case, diagnose the actual failure, and quote repair against replacement honestly. Original pre-war mortise hardware is frequently worth saving, both because it's better made than modern builder-grade and because matching the door prep for new hardware on a landmark door is its own project.

Yes — NYC DCWP locksmith license #2109597, and every technician works under it. New York City requires locksmiths to be licensed, and it matters for practical reasons: a licensed shop has a fixed business address (we have two), accountability if something goes wrong, and no incentive to run the drill-everything pricing scam that unlicensed dispatch operations depend on. If you're comparing locksmiths, ask for the license number and an address before you ask for the price. A company that won't give you both isn't a company — it's a phone number.