Lock Rekeying in Daly City
$29 to $46 per cylinder. The lock stays on the door and takes new pins, which kills every key handed out before today. Front door, garage service door and pedestrian door on one key is the usual order here. Cylinders after the first cost less, because the drive only happened once.
$29–$46 per cylinder
Typical price
18 min
Avg. arrival
24/7
Availability
Rekeying keeps the lock and changes who can open it. The cylinder stays in the door and receives a new set of bottom pins, so it answers a new key and stops answering every key handed out before today. Nothing about the door looks different afterward. What changes is the list of people who can walk in.
Four situations produce most of this work in Daly City. A house changes hands, and with a median around $1.11 million the market turns over briskly while the cylinder in the door may be sixty or seventy years old and have collected keys the whole time. A garage that has become a separate dwelling needs its own key, kept off the schedule the family upstairs uses. A tenant leaves that unit and the next one arrives. And a household simply needs more keys than the two the last locksmith cut, which on a three-bedroom house of 1,100 to 1,400 square feet with several adults driving in and out is not unusual at all.
The work is done on the van bench. The plug comes out on a follower, the old stacks are tipped into a tray, and new stacks go in to a fresh key. Where the keyways allow, the garage-level door, the door at the top of the internal steps, the front door up the outside stair and a side gate padlock all come onto one blade, which is the part most households are actually pleased about. One key on the ring instead of four, and no sorting through them in the wind at the bottom of the steps.
There is one honest limit and on this coast it comes up regularly. A plug worn or pitted out of round cannot be repinned usefully, because new pins in a bad plug give you a lock that binds on a brand new key. That is most often the outdoor gate cylinder or a low door that has taken a couple of decades of onshore fog. When that is what is on your door you hear it at the bench, with a replacement priced against the published $125 to $329 instead of being folded in quietly.
Rekeying is $29 to $46 per cylinder, with the $89 call-out counted once for the stop rather than once per lock. Four cylinders is a short hour. Every retired key is tried in every rekeyed lock in front of you and seen to fail, and then handed back to you rather than pocketed. That, and not the receipt, is the proof the change happened.
“We finished the conversion downstairs and had a mess of keys: the garage side door, the new unit door, the door up into the hallway and the front. Four cylinders at $34 each with the $89 visit inside, $225 total. Our tenant's key opens the unit and nothing else, ours opens all four, and he wrote out which key does what on the receipt so I have it in writing when somebody moves out. He also swapped the hallway door onto the same key without charging me for a fifth cylinder we did not need.”
Sixteen jobs, fourteen of them with a range and two quoted once the openings have been counted on site. What moves a figure inside its range here is which door you mean and what the salt has done to it: a cylinder still turning cleanly takes the low end, a plug pitted by years of fog takes the high one. Say which door and how the key feels, and the range closes to a single number on the call.
- Daytime (7am–8pm)standard rates
- Evening (8pm–12am)+$50
- Overnight (12am–7am)+$90
FAQ
Lock Rekeying: quick answers
We just closed on a Westlake house. Rekey or replace?+
Repin, in nearly every case. It retires every key held by the previous owner, the agent, the gardener and whoever else collected one over sixty years, and it costs a fraction of new hardware. Replacement is the answer for a lock that has actually failed, not for a lock with a long history.
We rent out the converted garage. Should it share a key with the house?+
No. Separate it. The unit door gets its own key and its own change on turnover, and the house above keeps a key that does not open it. If you want a single key of your own that opens both, that is a small master key arrangement rather than a shared cylinder, and it is worth setting up properly the first time.
How many locks can be done in one visit?+
As many as the property has. The $89 call-out counts once for the stop and each cylinder is $29 to $46, so the second, third and fourth doors are the inexpensive part. Four exterior cylinders onto one key is usually inside an hour.
Related
More residential services
Open 24 hours, 7 days
Say which door you are standing at and the call gets short
Daly City and the north Peninsula, every hour of the day. The door decides the work and the work decides the number, so the figure comes back on the call with the $89 call-out and the hour already inside it, and it is the figure on the receipt. Ninety days on the labor, in writing.