What actually moves the price of a house rekey

A rekey is priced by how many lock cylinders get repinned, plus the visit itself. A three-bedroom with two exterior doors is a smaller job than a two-bedroom with five — front, back, side, garage entry, bulkhead. Walk your own perimeter and count keyholes before you call; that count is most of the quote, and knowing it gets you a real number on the phone instead of a range.

What does not move the price: the size of the house, the age of the neighborhood, or how nice the doors look. A cylinder is a cylinder. What does: doubles. A door with a keyed knob and a keyed deadbolt is two cylinders, not one, and most front doors are exactly that.

Houses accumulate hardware the way they accumulate paint colors — a Schlage front door, a Kwikset side door, something unbranded on the garage. Different brands use different keyways, and cylinders on different keyways cannot share a key no matter how they are pinned.

That forces a choice: live with two keys, or swap the odd cylinder over so everything matches. The swap adds parts to the bill but usually wins over time, because one key for the whole house is the thing people actually wanted when they called. It is worth asking for the both-ways quote — with the swap and without — because the difference is usually smaller than expected.

A clean, modern cylinder repins in minutes. A seized one on a weathered door — common on Lawrence's older stock, where exterior hardware has eaten decades of salt air off the Merrimack and winter grit — takes real time, and sometimes turns out to be a replacement conversation instead, which is a different job covered by the rekeying service page.

Timing matters too: a scheduled weekday visit and a Sunday-night call are different prices everywhere in this trade, so rekeying is the kind of work worth booking rather than treating as an emergency. And if a lockout is what triggered the rekey, having it done during the same visit avoids paying for the trip twice.

Four things get you an accurate quote: the keyhole count including doubles, the brands if you can read them off the hardware, whether you want everything keyed alike, and how many copies of the new key you want cut on the spot. Say if any lock already sticks — surprises found mid-job are the main reason quotes drift.

One thing this page deliberately does not do is quote numbers, because rates change and a page that promises one is lying to someone eventually. The drivers above are stable; the phone quote from whoever handles your house work should map onto them, and if it does not, ask why.