Two different jobs, and in Vancouver the door usually decides which one you need. A suite door in a Cambie Corridor tower comes apart in minutes. A front door in Kerrisdale often carries a lock buried in its edge that is older than anyone now living on the block. We do both from the truck, priced before we start.
A rekey re-pins the cylinder you already have so the old keys stop turning and a new one works. A lock change takes the whole lockset off the door and puts different hardware in its place. At the same grade the rekey is exactly as secure, because a pin stack fitted this afternoon is no easier to pick than one fitted at the factory, and it costs a fraction of the alternative. What decides which one your door needs is almost never your budget. It is what the door was built to hold.
Vancouver doors fall into three rough families and they behave nothing alike under a key. Most of the city is a bored cylinder, drilled straight through the face of the door, and those come apart in minutes. A good deal of the west side and the pre-war east side is a mortise body set into the edge of the door instead, and what can be done to one of those depends entirely on what is inside it. Then there is the door whose cylinder is mechanically fine but whose keyway no longer has blanks in circulation: a lock you can re-pin and still cannot cut a spare for. We work out which of the three you have on the phone wherever we can, because it changes the price and it changes what goes on the truck.
Each band below covers one job type, and the row says what the figure counts, because a per-cylinder price and a per-job price are not comparable numbers. What moves a job inside its band is the brand and grade of the hardware, the cylinder type, whether older hardware has to come apart before it can be re-pinned, and how many locks are done on the same visit, since the per-cylinder figure drops when several are done together. The last row is the service call itself, which is charged on dispatch and then applied against the work rather than added on top of it. Our neighbourhood pages publish their own rekey bands, and those are written on different bases: some quote the labour alone, some include the service call, some apply it against the job. That is why an area figure and a citywide figure can differ on the same door, and it is why the number that counts is the one you are given on the phone for your own hardware, confirmed at the door before anything is opened.
| Job | Published range |
|---|---|
| Rekey an existing residential deadbolt or knob, per cylinder | $35 – $65 |
| Rekey several locks onto one key, same visit | $25 – $50 each cylinder (bulk) |
| Grade 2 residential deadbolt supplied and fitted, hardware and labour, one door | $120 – $200 |
| Grade 1 deadbolt or high-security cylinder supplied and fitted, hardware and labour, one door | $180 – $320 |
| Commercial deadbolt re-pinned or replaced | $80 – $160 per cylinder |
| Service call and dispatch to one address | $49 – $75 (applied to work) |
Multi-door houses and strata handovers are quoted as one package rather than lock by lock. Anything sitting outside those bands, such as a mortise body that has to be stripped or a closed keyway only the building's registered dealer can cut, is quoted before we start and never added afterwards. The commercial row above is a per-cylinder figure, which is the right way to price a single door or a handful of them. A whole site is priced on the number of doors instead, and that band is published with the rest of the commercial work on the commercial locksmith page.
The brand on the faceplate if you can read it, anything stamped on the key itself, and whether the key goes into a knob, into a deadbolt, or into the edge of the door. Those three answers are usually enough to quote a range and load the right cylinders.
Rekeying is a permanent change to who can open a door, so we check the door is yours to change. Photo ID matching the address covers an owner. A lease, a recent utility bill in your name, or a landlord confirming by text while we stand there covers a tenant. A shared or common-area door is the owner's call, not ours or yours.
New keys are cut on the truck and tried in every lock they are meant to open while you watch. A single cylinder is usually about 20 minutes. A door carrying both a deadbolt and a latch set runs closer to 45.
A mortise lock is a body let into the edge of the door rather than a cylinder bored through its face, and a lot of this city still runs on them. Kerrisdale is full of houses built between the 1920s and the 1950s. Dunbar has its craftsman and stucco character homes from the 1940s and 50s. Point Grey has Craftsman and Tudor-Revival stock from the 20s and 30s along Tolmie Street and Drummond Drive, Kitsilano has character houses on West 4th and Point Grey Road from before 1960, First Shaughnessy has street after street of them, and the heritage conversions on Cambie and Beatty Street downtown have mortise pockets where a modern door would have a bore.
Three things can be inside that body, and each has a different answer. If it takes a removable cylinder, the cylinder comes out, gets re-pinned and goes back, and the brass on the outside of your door never moves. If it is ward-operated and takes a long-shank key of the sort people call a skeleton key, there are no pins in it at all: a key is filed to match the lock, or the wards themselves are altered. If the body is past working reliably, replacement is the third answer, and it is the expensive one for a reason that has nothing to do with the lock. A modern bored deadbolt will not drop into a mortise pocket. Replacing means either finding a mortise lockset that matches the pocket and backset already cut into your door, or filling and re-prepping the edge of an original slab, which is joinery work. Some pre-war lines have no parts left in circulation anywhere, so a salvaged body is occasionally the honest recommendation.
Where an original door needs to be more secure than its original lock can manage, there are three routes that leave the outside of it looking untouched: a separate deadbolt fitted above the mortise body, a strike reinforced into the framing rather than into the door stop, or a high-security cylinder dropped into the existing mortise housing. Heritage designation runs address by address here, and what yours allows on an original exterior door is not something a locksmith can tell you. Ask the city first. Nothing in this job has to be irreversible while you wait for the answer.
A lock change is a fitting job before it is a security job, and Vancouver's housing stock makes that literal. Most modern residential deadbolts and smart locks expect a 2-1/8 inch bore, which is what Canadian residential doors are drilled to, so on anything built in recent decades the new hardware drops straight in. Craftsman and post-war doors in Dunbar are commonly 1 3/4 inch solid wood, which is the best case: thick enough to carry a serious bolt without reinforcement. The older stock is where a swap stops being a swap. Bungalow preps in Marpole on West 64th and West 67th often carry non-standard backsets or a bore worn out of round, and the fix there is an adaptor plate rather than a new door. Kerrisdale hardware frequently predates standard sizing altogether, which is why the vans carry deadbolts with adjustable backsets. At the other end of the range, condo doors in the Brentwood-area buildings in Burnaby are usually a straightforward 60mm prep.
Grade is set by what the door is holding back. A downtown high-rise entry door takes Grade 1 hardware. The suite door behind it is a lighter job: the Cambie Corridor buildings and the Broadway towers between West 6th and West 12th typically run a Grade 1 or Grade 2 single-cylinder deadbolt on the suite door, with the common entry on a separate fob or access-control system that belongs to the building. So a rekey in one of those towers is a suite-door job and stops at your own cylinder. We do not override the building's side of it, and you should not need permission for your side. At the bottom of the range, an old Grade 3 lock on an entry door is a reason to replace rather than re-pin. There is not much point putting fresh pins into a lock that was never rated for the job it is doing.
Re-pinning changes who can open your door. It does not change whether you can get another key cut, and in Vancouver those are separate questions. Several keyways still in daily use here are no longer sold. Van stock covers the common residential families, Weiser, Kwikset and Schlage, plus the Legacy cylinders and pins the trucks carry for West End work, and compatible cylinders for several profiles that are long out of production but still working doors in Grandview-Woodland. Those we can re-pin, and usually cut from van stock. Two cases stop us. One is a controlled keyway in a newer tower, where blanks go only to the building manager's supplier and we confirm compatibility before we dispatch rather than after. The other is a keyway with no blanks left in circulation anywhere, and there a rekey leaves you with exactly the number of keys you are holding today and no way to make a third, which is usually the moment a lock change earns its money.
The deliberate version of the same idea is a restricted keyway, where blanks are only sold to the dealer the system is registered to and a copy cannot be cut at a hardware counter. That is worth the extra money on a rear or lane door, and on any door a tenant, a cleaner or a trade holds a key to. Keying several doors alike is straightforward where the hardware already shares a keyway and impossible where it does not, so it is worth confirming before you decide what goes on which key. For how a key plan gets drawn on a property with more than one household, see residential locksmith, and master key systems for the point where keying alike stops being enough.
Four situations where fresh pins are the wrong purchase.
Corrosion is the first, and it is a question about the cylinder rather than about the keying. Re-pinning swaps the pins and leaves the plug and the shell they ride in exactly as they were, so a plug that has gone rough drags on a new set of pins the same way it dragged on the old ones. The test is the key you are already holding. If it has to be lifted, jiggled or eased back a fraction before the plug will turn, the wear is in the metal and fresh pins inherit it. On hardware in that condition a new cylinder is usually the cheaper of the two purchases, because a second visit to chase the same drag costs more than the part did.
The second is a lock that was never rated for its door: a builder-grade knob with a short latch and no separate deadbolt behind it, which still turns up on back doors and basement-suite entries across the east side. There the money belongs in a deadbolt with a throw worth having and a strike screwed through into the framing, because a rear door that gets forced is forced at the frame rather than at the cylinder.
The third is what is left after a forced entry. A break-in usually does more damage to the jamb than to the lock, and pinning the original cylinder back into a split frame is decorative. That job is frame realignment, new hardware and boarding where it is needed, done in one visit.
The fourth is a door that has dropped. If the bolt has to be lifted or shouldered into the strike, the lock is innocent and a new one will bind again by the first wet November. That is door repair, and it costs less than the lockset you were about to buy.
A rekey is the easy version of this job in a strata building precisely because none of it is visible from the corridor. The brand, the finish and the exterior escutcheon stay as they were and only the pin arrangement inside the cylinder changes, which is what a bylaw about hardware consistency is actually asking for. Replacing the whole lockset is the version that sometimes needs your council's sign-off. Stacked townhomes are the case people forget: the complexes off West 12th in Fairview and on the side streets between Cambie and Heather often carry a front-door deadbolt and a second suite door behind it, and the strata may want both kept on a keyway that stays compatible with its master. For fobs, controlled keyways and what your bylaws actually permit, the residential locksmith page works through it.
Mobile lock change and rekey across Vancouver and the central Metro cities, with same-day availability in most areas.
The doors we rekey usually sit alongside something else that needs attention, from a strike that no longer lines up to a lane door with nothing but a latch on it.
Pick-, drill- and bump-resistant cylinders with keys that can’t be copied at the hardware store. Cut, pinned and registered in-shop.
1/2" steel door, digital keypad, fitted and bolted on site.
Car keys are priced by vehicle. Pick what you need and we’ll collect your make, model & year to text you an exact quote.