Last updated 25 September 2026
Ten locksmith leads in a row, and not one was a lockout.
Leads Do Work sells locksmith leads at £19 each plus VAT. Lead Pronto quotes a guide price from £15, and Zapo, formerly Get Work, runs search ads for locksmiths from £400 a month plus VAT, about £40 per lead it estimates. Buy the click yourself and Google charges £4.90 to £34.68 when someone taps a locksmith ad.
What the price list doesn't tell you is which jobs come through it. Somebody standing outside their own front door at 11pm phones a locksmith. The person who fills in a form is the one whose uPVC lock has been sticking for a week.
A real lead, word for word
"The key for my UPVC door is jamming. I am not able to lock the door."
That's from Croydon, on Leads Do Work's public feed of locksmith leads. Of the 10 on it, dated June to September, none was a lockout. It's a £19 lead for a job Checkatrade prices at £100 to £150, and the sums below work from there.
Where we stand
We don't sell locksmith leads. We help you get your own.
This guide is the honest version of what buying locksmith leads costs, and who else gets them. What we do instead is build locksmiths a website that turns visits into calls, and run Google Ads in an account in your own name, so every lead that comes in is a customer who found you, and nobody else was sold it.
What you are buying
The leads on sale are lock changes, and a lock change can carry a £19 lead.
Read the feed and it's planned work: "New locks on outside doors" in Durham, a Leamington Spa door whose "locking mechanism ... needs fixing", a Preston mortice where the key "won't turn completely". One Bristol customer with a jammed patio door said they could "get you in any morning next week". Those are jobs worth quoting properly, and none of them is a race against four other vans to a doorstep at midnight.
Here is what a lead costs per job won, at Leads Do Work's published price and Zapo's estimate, winning one quote in 3.
| Job | Typical UK price | Leads Do Work, £19 a lead | Zapo, about £40 a lead |
|---|---|---|---|
| Get a customer back in | £90 to £130 | £57 a win, 52% of the job | £120 a win, 109% of the job |
| Change a standard uPVC lock | £100 to £150 | £57 a win, 46% of the job | £120 a win, 96% of the job |
| Replace a mortice lock | £115 to £165 | £57 a win, 41% of the job | £120 a win, 86% of the job |
| Change to an anti-snap uPVC lock | £125 to £175 | £57 a win, 38% of the job | £120 a win, 80% of the job |
| Replace a car key | £100 to £250 | £57 a win, 33% of the job | £120 a win, 69% of the job |
| Change every lock (two doors and the windows) | £400 to £600 | £57 a win, 11% of the job | £120 a win, 24% of the job |
Prices from Checkatrade's locksmith guide (tables dated May 2026) and, for car keys, MyBuilder's guide (August 2026), each worked at the middle of its range. Winning one quote in 3 is what MyJobQuote tells trades on its platform to expect. For Zapo we split its £400 plan across the 10 leads it expects that plan to bring. Both lead prices are before VAT.
Our rule of thumb is that winning a customer should cost 10 to 15 percent of what the job pays. No single lock change gets there: winning one quote in 3, Leads Do Work's leads cost 46% of a standard uPVC change. It only comes right when one visit becomes several locks, where the same leads cost 11% of changing the lot. So the lead is worth buying if you quote the whole house while you're stood in it.
If the customer is locked out
Zapo's estimated lead eats 109% of a £110 entry, more than the job. Leads Do Work's eats 52%. A lockout only pays through what comes after it, usually a new cylinder.
If you fit whole doors as well
Then you're in the door fitter's market, with bigger jobs and different sellers. Our double glazing leads guide covers window and door leads, and what one costs against a new front door.
Your numbers
What can you pay for a locksmith lead and still make money on it?
Choose the job you quote most, set how many quotes it takes you to land one, then put in what a seller charges. Try the lockout, then the whole-house change, and compare where each lands.
WHAT CAN YOU PAY FOR A LOCKSMITH LEAD?
Pick a job, or type in what yours are worth
Starts on one in three, the figure MyJobQuote tells its own trades to expect. Put in yours.
You can pay up to about
£6
a lead, winning one in 3
- Healthy range, per won job
- £13 to £19
- Which per lead is
- £4 to £6
Put a seller's price in the last box and this will tell you what each won job would cost you.
That 10 to 15 percent line is our own sense check for any trade, with no study behind it.
Who sells them
Nine firms sell locksmith leads. Only one prints a fixed price per lead.
Every row below comes off the seller's own website. Where the sharing column says it isn't stated, the seller doesn't say.
| Seller | Price | Who else gets the lead | In their words |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leads Do Work | £19 a lead + VAT, £11 a week | 1 to 3 others, 5 at most | "no more than 5 competing" |
| Lead Pronto | From £15 a lead, a guide price | Agreed before launch | "Distribution is agreed with you" |
| Zapo (formerly Get Work) | £400 to £1,600 + VAT a month | Nobody | "exclusive leads to locksmith companies" |
| PromoSEO | From £500 a month | Nobody in your area | "one company per area" |
| Leads Everyday | A flat monthly fee, not published | Nobody | "never shared with competitors" |
| MyJobQuote | Credits, price shown after sign-up | Up to 3 locksmiths | "Up to 3 local Locksmiths" |
| MyBuilder | A fee when shortlisted | Not stated | "Only pay a fee when shortlisted" |
| Bark | Credits, priced by job and area | Not stated | "valid for 3 months" |
| Checkatrade (with Rated People) | Fixed plans, or pay per lead on its board | Off the board after 3 pay | "Memberships are for 12 months" |
Leads Do Work: one locksmith row, and a feed you can read
Its price list has a single line for the trade, "Locksmiths / Locksmith", at £19 from a homeowner and £29 from a business, plus VAT and an £11 weekly fee. There's no separate row for a lockout, a car key or an upgrade, so they all cost the same. Its terms say a job normally goes to 1 to 3 other firms as well as you, and never to more than 5.
Its locksmith page says "emergency lockouts happen year-round" and that speed "matters more than almost any other factor". Its own feed tells a quieter story: 10 leads across the whole UK in about three months, most of them sticking uPVC locks. Read it before you sign up for a weekly quota in one town.
Lead Pronto: a guide price and a fine from the ICO
"Locksmith leads start from £15 per lead delivered. That is a guide price", with booked appointments from £130 and branded campaigns at "a typical fee of 25% of the ad spend". It doesn't promise the lead is yours alone: "Distribution is agreed with you before launch." Its figures of 15% of leads booking an appointment and 82% of appointments attended are for its whole network, not locksmiths. The ICO fined it £30,000 in November 2025, covered further down.
Zapo, PromoSEO and Leads Everyday run ads and call them leads
Zapo "delivers exclusive leads to locksmith companies" through search adverts: its cheapest plan is £400 a month plus VAT, of which £200 buys clicks, for 10 leads it estimates. PromoSEO sells emergency locksmith leads to "one company per area" from £500 a month and runs a "make good policy" on bad ones. Leads Everyday builds a landing site, runs Google Ads and charges a flat monthly fee it won't print. Insite Web, an agency, wants "a budget of at least £1.5K". Each of these is buying clicks for you from the auction covered in the next section.
The marketplaces cap it at three and keep the price back
MyJobQuote tells customers "Up to 3 local Locksmiths will then be in touch", and Mylocaltoolbox says "A maximum of three locksmiths can buy a lead." Checkatrade's Opportunities Board takes a lead down once 3 trades have paid to see it, and Rated People's locksmith categories now feed Checkatrade. MyBuilder charges when you're shortlisted, win or lose; more in is MyBuilder worth it. Bark says its average locksmith job is £95, which is what the customer pays you, not what the lead costs. What three locksmiths on one sticking lock does to your quote is in the shared-lead trap.
The national networks work the other way round
Rightio, Keytek and LockRite recruit self-employed locksmiths and pay them per job. Rightio says there are "No joining membership charges" and pitches "confirmed jobs rather than warm leads". None of them publishes its rates, so the question to ask is what share of the customer's bill reaches you, and whose name is on the invoice.
Everything here about Leads Do Work's contract comes from its own published terms and conditions, last read on 24 September 2026. Terms get revised, so check yours against the current version before you act on anything.
Rather have locksmith leads that are yours alone?
That's what we do. We don't sell leads. We build the website and run the Google Ads that bring locksmith customers straight to you, in an ad account in your name that stays yours if you ever leave.
See pricingBuying the click yourself
The lockout click can cost more than the lockout.
"locksmith leads", the search a locksmith types to find a seller, gets about 10 searches a month at £11.16 a click. The homeowner's "emergency locksmith near me" is £34.68, about 3.1 times as much, and "locksmith near me" is £24.47 across 74,000 searches a month. In one city it goes further: "emergency locksmith london" is £66.89 a click. The per-lead figures divide each click by 7.33%, the share of home improvement search clicks that WordStream found turning into leads. Its data is American, so treat them as rough.
| Search | Searches a month | Per click | Per lead |
|---|---|---|---|
| emergency locksmith near me | 3,600 | £34.68 | £473 |
| emergency locksmith | 4,400 | £31.34 | £428 |
| locked out of house | 390 | £31.10 | £424 |
| 24 hour locksmith near me | 1,000 | £29.31 | £400 |
| locksmith | 33,100 | £25.28 | £345 |
| locksmith near me | 74,000 | £24.47 | £334 |
| local locksmith | 2,900 | £22.61 | £308 |
| lock change near me | 260 | £21.71 | £296 |
| commercial locksmith | 260 | £18.82 | £257 |
| door lock repair | 480 | £10.32 | £141 |
| lock change | 1,300 | £9.14 | £125 |
| upvc door lock repair | 480 | £8.05 | £110 |
| auto locksmith near me | 12,100 | £4.90 | £67 |
UK Google Ads figures, pulled 24 September 2026. Per-click prices are Google's forecast from other advertisers' bids, and your own invoice will differ.
At that rate a lead off "emergency locksmith near me" costs about £473, and Checkatrade prices getting someone back in at £90 to £130. Bidding hardest on the lockout is how a locksmith pays Google more than the job brings in. The cheaper searches are the ones that match the work the lead feed shows: "lock change" at £9.14, about £125 a lead, and "auto locksmith near me" at £4.90 across 12,100 searches, where a car key pays £100 to £250. The car's other faults are a mechanic's work, and how those leads are sold is in our mobile mechanic leads guide.
At £67 to £473 a lead your own ads cost more per lead than Leads Do Work's £19. What they buy is the choice of job and a caller who rang you alone:
- Bid on lock changes, upgrades and car keys
- Cap what you pay for the midnight click
- Your own name on the ad and the website
- A price range on the website, not a "from"
- Pay Google direct, no markup
- The account stays yours
Google's UK list for Local Services Ads has no locksmith category, which leaves ordinary search ads as the paid route. To pick a monthly figure, start with how much to spend on Google Ads.
Who you bid against
In the UK, Google lets any locksmith advertise without a check.
In the United States and Canada, a locksmith can't run Google Ads until it passes Advanced Verification, which Google says exists "to prevent unauthorised businesses from advertising using false identities" and which typically takes six to eight weeks, video call included. In Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and Belgium, Google's local services policy doesn't let locksmith ads run at all. The UK is on neither list. Here, "ads for local services are able to run ... even if the business hasn't completed verification."
So the auction you bid in includes anyone who calls themselves a locksmith, and the regulator has had to step in. On 31 July 2024 the Advertising Standards Authority upheld a ruling against four "local" locksmith websites, for Chalfont St Peter, Cranleigh, Frimley and West Molesey. Each promised a "30 minute fast response" and said it had "Served The Area For Several Years", and the ASA found the addresses "were in fact for residential homes or for a different and unrelated business."
Saying you're local
CAP's advice is that a "local" claim needs "a permanent registered office or branch in that area". "We do jobs in" a town is fine. Write whichever is true.
Your Google Business Profile
Google's eligibility rules name "Lead generation agents or companies" as ineligible, and its guidelines rule out a virtual office and want a number "under the direct control of the business".
A seller's front page
A lead that came through a site calling itself "[Town] Locksmith" arrives expecting whoever that site promised. Ask the seller which name and address the customer saw before you pay for it.
None of this stops you. It means the real name, the real base and a price range on your own website are the things a fake local can't copy, and they are exactly what a nervous customer is looking for. Our guide to a suspended Business Profile covers why Google watches locksmith listings more closely than most.
Proving you're real
Nobody licenses locksmiths, so the customer goes looking for proof.
The Master Locksmiths Association puts it bluntly: the trade "is not regulated in any way by the Government in the United Kingdom", so "anybody can trade as a locksmith irrespective of their competence, background or motive." By its own estimate around 6,500 locksmiths are trading and 340+ are MLA Approved, which means a DBS check, regular inspection and a locksmith who has passed its qualification.
What you can put on the ad
MLA approval if you hold it, your insurance, your own name and where you're based. Don't write "licensed locksmith": there's no licence to have. The one exception is holding customers' keys as a security service under contract, which needs an SIA key holding licence.
What the scam looks like
The MLA has seen bait prices of £39, £49, £59 in Google Ads at the top of the page. In 2019 Islington Trading Standards took AM London Locksmiths to court: it advertised prices "from just £59" from a virtual office and charged as much as £820.
That's why a price range beats a "from £59" headline. Checkatrade's guide puts a daytime hour at £65 and midnight to 6am at £120, with an out-of-hours call-out of £50 to £150. Publish your own version of that table and the customer who has been warned about £820 bills can see yours isn't one.
At the door
The second job is the lock the customer's insurer asks for.
Allianz tells its customers "Most insurers insist your lock conforms to British Standard BS3621", and that if the locks fall short "you could face a rejected claim later on." Aviva's loss prevention standard calls BS 3621 the standard "most commonly cited by UK insurers" and says "TS 007 cylinders with a 3 Star rating can resist" snapping. Even Leads Do Work says planned upgrades rise "when insurance policies require compliant locks".
What to check while you're there
A timber door's mortice needs at least 5 levers to meet BS3621, the MLA says, and it's BSI that certifies it, not the insurer. On uPVC and composite doors, Allianz points to PAS3621 locks. Tell the customer to check their own policy wording rather than calling anything "insurance approved".
What it adds to the bill
Checkatrade prices an anti-snap uPVC change at £125 to £175, against £100 to £150 for a standard one. On a £110 lockout, fitting the upgrade on the same visit more than doubles what that call is worth.
The call-out has no cooling-off. The upgrade does
When a customer asks you out to fix something urgently, the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 take that visit out of the 14-day cancellation right. The same regulation keeps the right for "services in addition to the urgent repairs or maintenance requested" and for goods beyond the parts the repair needed. Getting someone back in is the urgent repair; the BS3621 lock on the back door is extra.
- Opening the door they called about: no 14 days
- A snapped cylinder swapped to get them in: a necessary part
- Upgrading the other doors: 14 days to cancel
- Starting that inside 14 days: get the request in writing
On a small job done there and then, up to £170, regulation 11 lightens the paperwork but still wants an estimate of the total price. Leaving out the cancellation information on anything that needs it is a criminal offence, and under regulation 36 the customer may owe nothing for work done in the cancellation period without it.
Through the year
Locksmith searches barely have a quiet month.
Leads Do Work says "emergency lockouts happen year-round", and Zapo says volumes "vary by sector, location and season". UK searches for "locksmith near me" sat at 74,000 in 8 of the last 12 months, and the lowest, November, was about 1.5 times quieter.
UK searches for "locksmith near me", by month
September 2025 to August 2026. Google Ads keyword data, rounded bands.
Budget by the hour, not the month
With demand this flat, a steady monthly budget works. What changes is the time of day: Checkatrade's rates run from £65 an hour in the day to £120 after midnight, so set your ad schedule to the hours you'll actually answer.
Emergency searches fell away
"emergency locksmith near me" went from 6,600 searches in September 2025 to 2,400 in August 2026, while the plain "locksmith near me" held. Twelve months can't tell you why, but it's one more reason not to build the whole budget on the word emergency.
Where the lead came from
One of the locksmith lead sellers has already been fined by the ICO.
Lead Pronto, £30,000
In November 2025 the ICO fined Lead Pronto Ltd over boiler grant text messages it sent on consent bundled into its privacy policy, which named none of the 18 clients it generated data for. The fine wasn't about locksmith leads, but it's the same firm quoting you £15 for one.
The Information Commissioner's Office wants a lead buyer's checks to match the risk, and it won't accept the seller's word as the whole of them. We found no ICO case naming a locksmith. The fines across home improvement are listed in our roofing leads guide.
Before paying for locksmith leads, ask the seller:
- Which website or ad did the customer use?
- Whose name and address did that site show?
- Does the consent name my business?
- How many other locksmiths get the same lead?
- Is it a lockout, a lock change or a car key?
Keep each answer, dated, beside the lead it came with. If a customer ever complains, that note is your evidence of what you checked.
Which way to go
Buy leads for the planned work, and keep the night calls for yourself.
Buy per lead if
- uPVC repairs are your bread and butter
- You quote every door while there
- You reply within minutes
- You know whose site it came from
Think twice if
- You mostly do lockouts
- Up to five firms get the call
- The price is a "guide"
- The seller trades as a "local"
Run your own if
- You want upgrades and car keys
- You want your name on the ad
- You want the call alone
- Your account, kept if you leave
Plenty of locksmiths will do both: a few bought repair leads in a slow week, and their own ads, under their own name, for the upgrades and car keys. Every trade has the same choice to make, and our guide to trade leads puts them side by side. Thinking about a directory listing instead? Read is Checkatrade worth it first.
Our sources
How we got these locksmith figures.
We build websites and run Google Ads for trades, so weigh this guide with that in mind. Where a bought locksmith lead is cheaper per lead than your own ads, we've said so, and each seller is quoted from its own website.
The seller pages, price lists and Leads Do Work's lead feed were read on 24 September 2026, and the UK search volumes and click prices come from Google Ads data pulled the same day. The job prices come from the locksmith cost guides published by Checkatrade and MyBuilder. Google's rules are from its own ads policy and Business Profile guidelines, the fake-local finding from the ASA ruling, and the cancellation rules from legislation.gov.uk. The licensing and BS3621 points are the Master Locksmiths Association's, alongside Allianz and Aviva on insurance.
Questions locksmiths ask
Locksmith leads, answered.
- How much do locksmith leads cost in the UK?
- Leads Do Work publishes £19 a locksmith lead from a homeowner and £29 from a business, both plus VAT, with an £11 weekly fee. Lead Pronto gives a guide price of £15 a lead. Zapo, formerly Get Work, runs search ads for locksmiths from £400 to £1,600 a month plus VAT, about £40 per lead it estimates, and PromoSEO starts at £500 a month. Buying the click from Google yourself costs £4.90 to £34.68 on a locksmith search.
- Are locksmith leads shared with other locksmiths?
- On most platforms, yes. Leads Do Work puts 1 to 3 other firms on a job and never more than 5, and MyJobQuote lets up to 3 locksmiths quote. Zapo, PromoSEO and Leads Everyday say theirs go to one firm, and Lead Pronto agrees distribution with you before it starts.
- Are the locksmith leads you can buy mostly lockouts?
- Not on the feed we checked. Leads Do Work's public list of locksmith leads showed 10 between June and September, and not one was a lockout. They were new locks, uPVC mechanisms that catch or jam, a mortice key that won't turn and a bedroom door handle. Someone locked out rings a locksmith rather than filling in a form.
- Do UK locksmiths need Google verification to run ads?
- No. Google makes locksmiths pass Advanced Verification in the United States and Canada, and it doesn't allow locksmith ads at all in Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and Belgium. Everywhere else, the UK included, its policy says ads for local services can run without that check. There's no locksmith category in Local Services Ads in the UK either.
- Do you need a licence to work as a locksmith in the UK?
- No. The Master Locksmiths Association says the trade "is not regulated in any way by the Government". It estimates around 6,500 locksmiths are trading, with 340+ MLA Approved after a DBS check, inspection and its qualification. Holding customers' keys as a security service under contract is different: that needs an SIA key holding licence.
- Can a customer cancel after an emergency lockout?
- Not the call-out they asked for. The Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 take an urgent repair the customer requested out of the 14-day cancellation right. New locks or extra doors you agree on the doorstep keep the right, unless they are parts the repair needed, so hand over the cancellation information with that quote.
- Which locks do home insurers ask for?
- Usually BS3621. Allianz says "Most insurers insist your lock conforms to British Standard BS3621" and that falling short can mean a rejected claim. A BS3621 mortice lock has at least 5 levers, and BSI certifies it, not the insurer. On uPVC and composite doors the equivalents are PAS3621 locks and TS 007 3 star cylinders.
- Is locksmith work seasonal?
- Hardly. UK searches for "locksmith near me" sat at 74,000 a month in 8 months of the last 12, and the quietest month, November, was only about 1.5 times lower.
- What should I check before buying locksmith leads?
- Where the lead came from and whose name the customer saw. The ICO expects a buyer to make proportionate checks and says a seller's assurances aren't enough. Lead Pronto, which sells locksmith leads, was fined £30,000 by the ICO in November 2025 over text messages sent without valid consent.
Keep reading
More straight answers for trades.
Lock changes, upgrades and car keys in the diary, and every one of them rang you.
We build your website and run Google Ads in an account in your own name, under your own name, bidding on the lock changes, upgrades and car keys that pay rather than every midnight click in the county. See what it costs, then tell us about your locksmith business and we'll build the campaign around the jobs you want more of.