Emergency Locksmith in Stuart, FL

A lockout can happen anywhere, anytime. You step outside to grab the mail in Rio and the door swings shut. You're at Sailfish Marina after a long day and your keys are sitting on the seat with the doors locked. Whatever happened, standing outside your home, car, or business isn't just frustrating - in Florida's summer heat or a sudden Treasure Coast thunderstorm, it can get dangerous fast. Stuart Locksmiths responds to lockouts 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, including every holiday.

Our lockout process is non-destructive by default. That means we pick the lock or use specialized bypass tools to get you in without drilling or damaging the hardware. Most residential lockouts take us between 10 and 18 minutes from the moment we get out of the truck. Commercial lockouts, especially buildings with multi-point locking systems, may run 20 to 35 minutes. Either way, you're back inside far faster than waiting for a family member to drive a spare key from Port St. Lucie.

Keys break inside locks more often than you'd think, and the reason is almost always the same: the key was already worn or the lock cylinder was stiff, and someone applied sideways pressure while turning. The fragment jams itself deeper every time you try to fish it out with a bobby pin or tweezers. Stop. Anything you push into that cylinder risks wedging the piece further in, which turns a $75 extraction into a $150 cylinder replacement. Call us first.

We use professional extraction hooks and pick sets sized specifically for the lock profile in front of us - Kwikset, Schlage, Medeco, Mul-T-Lock, it doesn't matter. In most cases we pull the fragment clean in under 15 minutes and then cut you a new key on-site. If the cylinder is damaged in the process, we carry replacement cylinders in common residential and commercial sizes on every truck. You won't be standing there with a hole where your lock used to be.

Coming home to a kicked-in door is one of the worst feelings imaginable. First priority is always your safety - don't go inside until law enforcement clears the property. Once the Martin County Sheriff's Office has done their walkthrough and you have a report number, that's when you call Stuart Locksmiths. We repair and replace compromised entry points so your home or business is secured again the same day, not three days from now when a contractor can squeeze you in.

Burglary damage usually involves a splintered door frame, a destroyed deadbolt, or both. We carry heavy-duty strike plate reinforcement kits, Grade 1 deadbolts, and door frame repair hardware on every truck. A standard single-door burglary repair runs $150 to $275 depending on the damage level. We'll also walk you through home security upgrades that make re-entry exponentially harder - because the FBI's Uniform Crime Report consistently shows that upgraded strike plates and Grade 1 deadbolts reduce successful kick-ins by over 60%.

There are situations where rekeying isn't enough. If your locks are old, damaged, or you've just moved into a home on SE Monterey Road and have no idea how many copies of that key are floating around, a full lock change gives you absolute certainty. Same goes for a domestic situation where a key holder shouldn't have access anymore. An emergency lock change means we replace the physical hardware - new locks, new keys, new peace of mind - usually within an hour of arrival.

We stock Schlage B-series, Kwikset SmartKey, and Defiant Grade 2 deadbolts for budget-conscious situations, plus Medeco and Mul-T-Lock for clients who want high-security lock installation that can't be picked or drilled. The price range for a standard emergency lock change runs $125 to $200 per door for the hardware and labor combined. We'll also rekey any matching locks in your home to the new key so you're not juggling 4 different keys for 4 different doors.

Not every emergency requires a full replacement. Locks fail in specific ways: the deadbolt won't retract, the thumb-turn spins without engaging, the cylinder feels like you're stirring gravel when you turn the key. These are almost always repairable, and repair costs significantly less than replacement. A lock repair at Stuart Locksmiths typically runs $65 to $110, compared to $125+ for a full swap. Salt air off the St. Lucie River accelerates corrosion in lock cylinders, so this is more common here than in inland cities.

Our technicians disassemble the lock on-site, identify the worn or failed component (usually a worn plug, a cracked cam, or a corroded spring), replace the part, and lubricate the entire mechanism before reassembly. We use dry PTFE lubricant rather than WD-40, which is the single most common homeowner mistake - WD-40 attracts dust, gums up the pins, and speeds up wear. If you've been spraying WD-40 into your locks for years, the good news is we can clean them out and get them working properly again.