Apartment Lockout Service NYC

Locked out of your apartment in New York City? Call (844) 912-1908 and a licensed technician is dispatched to your door. Getting you back inside is the first ten minutes of the visit. The part most people are not thinking about in a hallway at midnight is the rest of it: if the key that failed is lost, borrowed, shared with a former roommate or still sitting with a contractor, the cylinder needs to be rekeyed before that door is actually yours again. SwiftLocksmith opens the door, and in the same visit will rekey it, repair a failing lock, replace worn hardware or upgrade you to a high-security cylinder. Lock changes and rekeying are the work this shop does best, and a lockout is the cheapest moment to have it done, because the technician is already standing at the door with the cylinder out.

Pricing is the price we publish. Evening lockouts are $125 flat (6:00 PM to 2:00 AM). Overnight lockouts, 2:00 AM to 7:00 AM, are $195. Hardware is quoted before anything is installed, and you get a firm number before work starts. On response time we will be straight with you rather than promise the 20 minutes every ad in this trade promises: off-peak, most apartment calls in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx are reached in 20 to 40 minutes from our Astoria dispatch base. Rush hour, a Staten Island run or a bridge backup takes longer, and dispatch will tell you the real window on the phone. Eight technicians cover the five boroughs, every one of them NYC DCWP licensed and working under $1M liability coverage.

Before a technician opens a residential unit door, a licensed NYC locksmith is supposed to establish that the person asking actually lives there. That check is the difference between a locksmith and a burglar with a drill, and any company that skips it is a company you should not have called. Expect to be asked for government photo ID, and for something that ties you to that unit: a lease, a piece of addressed mail, a utility bill, a bank statement on your phone, a lease photo in your email, or a doorman, super or neighbour willing to confirm you on the spot. If your ID still carries an old address, the second document is what carries the day, which is why we ask you to start digging for it while the van is still moving. You will be asked to sign a work order naming the address and the work performed, and that record stays on file. The check runs both ways: our technician shows you a NYC DCWP locksmith licence and photo ID before touching the door, and the licence number is provided on request. If someone shows up with neither, do not let them work.

The superintendent question comes up on nearly every call, and the answer surprises people. A super has no legal duty to let you into your own apartment. Many buildings expressly forbid it, because if the super opens a door for the wrong person the building carries the liability, and plenty of NYC supers simply do not hold a key to individual unit cylinders, especially where a previous tenant changed the lock. A super who does let you in is doing you a favour, not performing a duty, and waiting three hours for one to come back from the Bronx is usually slower and no cheaper than a locksmith. If you do reach your super, take the help. If you cannot, that is not an obstacle, it is Tuesday.

There is one situation where a locksmith is the wrong first call. If your landlord changed the locks on you, barred the door, removed your belongings or told you not to come back, that is not a lockout, it is an unlawful eviction under the NYC Administrative Code, and it applies to you once you have lived in the unit 30 consecutive days or hold a lease, whether or not you are behind on rent. A landlord in New York City has to go through Housing Court and a city marshal. Self-help lock changes are illegal, and courts here can order you restored to the apartment and award damages. In that case call 911 or 311 first and get the incident on record, then talk to us about the lock. We will not help a landlord lock a tenant out, and we do not take those jobs.

The last question is the one nobody asks in the hallway and everyone asks the next morning: who still has a key that works on this door? Rekeying is how you answer it. We re-pin the cylinder you already own to a fresh key, and every old key stops working that minute, at $75 per cylinder. A standard NYC apartment door with a knob and a deadbolt runs $150 to $185 for both cylinders, and it is done in under an hour while we are already there. Full lock replacement only makes sense when the hardware is worn, damaged, builder-grade or you want to move up to a Medeco, Mul-T-Lock or Schlage Primus cylinder with a restricted key blank that a corner shop cannot copy. Moving in, moving out a roommate, a breakup, a lost keyring on the F train, a super who kept a spare four tenants ago: those are all rekey calls wearing a lockout's clothes.