Lockers

Metal lockers are the default answer to a problem every workplace, school and leisure site eventually has: people arrive with belongings they cannot carry while they work, train or study, and those belongings need to go somewhere secure. This page covers the 68 steel locker configurations we stock, what actually drives the price, and — just as importantly — the four things people search for on this page that we do not sell, said plainly so you do not waste a phone call.

Everything here is a Probe locker, UK manufactured, cold-rolled mild steel with a powder-coated finish. Prices run from £324.04 for a single full-height compartment to £2,120.17 for a 30-compartment triple-width bank. If you already know your door count, jump straight to 1 door, 2 door, 3 door, 4 door, 5 door, 6 door, 8 door, 10 door or 16 door.

Metal lockers, steel lockers, staff lockers — one product, several names

Before anything else, a naming note, because the search terms people use to find this category are mostly synonyms for the same thing. Metal lockers, steel lockers, staff lockers, workplace lockers, office lockers, employee lockers, locker room lockers and personal storage lockers all describe the same object: a full-height powder-coated steel carcass divided into individually locking compartments. There is no specification difference between a "staff locker" and a "metal locker". The name usually reflects who is using it, not how it is built.

Four terms in this space do mean something different, and it is worth separating them out now:

• Wardrobe lockers — trade shorthand for a full-height single-door compartment, one person per column, tall enough to hang a coat rather than fold it. Covered in its own section below, along with an honest note about what we do and do not have.
• Storage lockers — a genuinely ambiguous term. Most people searching it want a self-storage unit to rent by the month, not a steel locker to buy. If that is you, this is the wrong page.
• Charging lockers — lockers with mains or USB outlets inside each compartment. We stock these, but they live on the PowerBox charging lockers page.
• Cupboards and cabinets — a single large lockable space rather than many small ones. See industrial cupboards, security cupboards, tool cupboards or drawer cabinets.

Two more phrases worth pinning down, because they promise a specification and do not deliver one. Heavy duty metal lockers and industrial lockers are marketing descriptions, not grades — there is no standard that defines either. Every locker on this page is cold-rolled mild steel built for daily institutional use, so by any reasonable reading they all qualify. If a supplier is charging a premium for "heavy duty", ask what is physically different: steel gauge, door reinforcement, lock type and hinge length are the things that actually vary between a cheap locker and a durable one. And metal lockers for sale near me is a distribution question rather than a product one — we are an online supplier delivering across the UK, not a trade counter you can walk into.

Are you legally required to provide lockers?

This is the question behind a large share of workplace locker enquiries, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a sales pitch.

There is no regulation in the UK that says "you must provide lockers". What there is, in the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992, is a duty to provide suitable and sufficient accommodation for clothing not worn during working hours (regulation 23), and — where employees have to change into special clothing, and would not for reasons of propriety or health change in a general room — suitable and sufficient changing facilities (regulation 24). The regulations describe an outcome, not a product. Pegs on a wall can satisfy regulation 23 in a low-risk office. They plainly do not in a site where clothing must be kept secure, kept clean, or kept apart from contaminated workwear.

The duty tightens where personal protective equipment is involved. The PPE at Work Regulations require an employer to provide appropriate accommodation for PPE when it is not being used, so that it is protected from damage, contamination and loss. A locker is the usual way that duty is discharged, which is why PPE lockers are specified as a compliance item rather than a staff amenity.

So the honest position: lockers are not mandatory by name, but the outcomes the regulations require are difficult to achieve without them once clothing must be secure, separated or protected. If someone is telling you a specific locker is "the legal requirement", ask them which regulation says so.

One related question worth answering because it comes up constantly: can an employer search a staff locker? Generally the locker is the employer's property on the employer's premises, so a search is usually possible — but it normally depends on there being a clear, communicated policy, and how it is done matters. That is an employment-law question rather than a specification question, and we are not the right people to answer it definitively for your organisation.

What actually drives the price: cost per compartment

Locker pricing looks confusing until you stop comparing unit prices and start comparing cost per compartment. Across our range that figure runs from £52.89 to £366.91 — a factor of seven — and the single biggest driver is not door count. It is whether the unit is nested.

A nested locker joins two or three full columns into one bank sharing internal carcass walls. You buy fewer sides, fewer tops and fewer floors for the same number of compartments, and you use less wall length. The saving is substantial and consistent:

Configuration	Compartments	From	Per compartment
Standard Metric 10 door, flat top, double width (300 mm)	20	£1,057.87	£52.89
Standard Metric 10 door, flat top, triple width	30	£1,621.61	£54.05
Standard Metric 6 door, flat top, triple width	18	£990.64	£55.04
Standard Metric 8 door, flat top, triple width	24	£1,322.62	£55.11
Perforated Metric 6 door, flat top, triple width	18	£1,040.17	£57.79
Standard Metric 8 door, sloping top, double width	16	£973.13	£60.82
Standard Imperial 8 door, flat top, double width	16	£1,005.19	£62.82
Standard Imperial 6 door, flat top, double width	12	£801.18	£66.77
PowerBox 16 door, flat top, 3-pin mains	16	£1,058.65	£66.17
Vision Panel 6 door, flat top, 300 mm	6	£505.60	£84.27
Vision Panel 3 door, flat top, 300 mm	3	£393.98	£131.33
Vision Panel 1 door, flat top, 300 mm	1	£324.04	£324.04

Read that table before you decide anything else. A 20-compartment nested bank at £1,057.87 costs less than three 6-door single columns and takes less wall. If your headcount allows nesting, nest — it is the cheapest structural decision available in this category, and it is invisible to the user once installed.

The corollary is worth stating too. Small units are expensive per compartment and that is not a pricing error. A 1-door locker at £324.04 costs six times per compartment what a nested 10-door double width does, because you are buying a complete full-height steel carcass to hold one person's coat. If you need single-occupancy lockers, budget accordingly rather than assuming the small one will be the cheap one.

The five ranges, and what separates them

Standard Metric — the default

Full-height 1800 mm steel locker, solid doors with reinforcing ribs and ventilation slots, a Type A cam lock on every compartment, and a coat hook inside each one. Widths are 300 mm; depths are 300, 380 or 450 mm. This is the range to specify unless something below gives you a reason not to. It is also the cheapest per compartment in every nested configuration.

Standard Imperial — for matching what is already there

Mechanically the same locker built to imperial dimensions: 1780 mm tall, with 305 × 305, 305 × 381 or 305 × 457 mm compartments. The 20 mm height difference and the slightly different footprint matter for exactly one reason — retrofit. If you are extending or replacing part of an existing imperial-format bank, mixing metric and imperial gives you a visible step along the top and mismatched door lines.

If you are starting fresh, specify metric. At triple width the imperial equivalent runs £198 to £324 dearer for the same compartment count — £990.64 against £1,188.77 at 6 door triple width, £1,621.61 against £1,945.93 at 10 door triple width. There is one exception in our current pricing where imperial comes in £30.22 below metric (8 door, flat top, double width — £1,005.19 against £1,035.41), so if that is your exact configuration it is worth checking both.

Perforated — for anything that goes away damp

Identical construction, but the doors are laser-cut perforated steel instead of solid. Carcass and floor stay solid; only the doors are perforated. That gives constant airflow through every compartment, which is what wet gym kit, swimming costumes, used PPE and worn overalls need if they are not to come out worse than they went in.

The premium is smaller than most people expect: £49.53 on an 18-compartment triple-width unit — £990.64 solid against £1,040.17 perforated. That is under £3 per compartment. If there is any chance of damp contents, the ventilation slots on the standard door are not really enough and the perforated door is the sensible spend. Gyms, leisure centres, swimming pools, fire and ambulance stations and industrial PPE areas are the obvious cases.

Vision Panel — for supervision

The Standard Metric locker with a reinforced acrylic vision panel set into a powder-coated steel surround in every door, so contents can be checked without unlocking. Specified where safeguarding, contraband control or safety checks matter — schools, clinical settings, secure sites and high-traffic communal locker rooms.

Two practical notes. It costs more per compartment than the equivalent solid-door unit, and the small configurations carry that premium hardest. And a vision panel is, by design, a reduction in privacy — which is a virtue in a school corridor and a problem in a staff changing room. Decide which of those you are furnishing.

PowerBox — storage plus charging

Full range detail sits on the charging lockers page, but the pricing logic belongs here because it surprises people. PowerBox comes in three charging specifications and the gap between them is large. At 10 door, flat top: 3-pin UK mains only £838.96, USB-A + USB-C £1,090.99, mains plus USB £1,164.50. At 16 door, flat top the spread is wider still — £1,058.65 mains-only against £1,770.61 for mains plus USB.

So the charging type costs more than the door count does. Before specifying the full mains-plus-USB build, work out what people are actually charging. If it is phones and tablets issued by you, USB alone may cover it. If it is a mixed estate of radios, laptops and personal devices with their own plugs, mains earns its money. All PowerBox units use certified internal wiring on a single mains feed with an external safety isolator, and are CE/UKCA marked.

One outlier to flag: the 4 door mains-plus-USB PowerBox at £975.72 works out at £243.93 per compartment — the worst value in the whole range apart from single-door units. If four charging points is genuinely all you need it is the right product, but the 8 door at £987.31 gives you twice the compartments for £11.59 more.

Flat top or sloping top — and the £24.77 per column

A sloping top is a wedge across the top of the locker that stops people storing bags, cups and clutter up there, and stops dust collecting. It is specified almost universally in schools, gyms and public-facing areas for exactly that reason, and avoided where the top of the locker is genuinely useful storage.

The useful fact, which is not published anywhere we can find: across our Probe range the sloping top is priced per column of width, at £24.77 a column — not per locker and not per door. A single-width unit is +£24.76 (£324.04 to £348.80 on the 1-door Vision Panel; the same £24.76–£24.78 on every PowerBox and every Vision Panel unit). A double-width unit is +£49.55 (£1,057.87 to £1,107.42 on the 10-door Standard Metric). A triple-width unit is +£74.31 (£990.64 to £1,064.95 on the 6-door triple; £1,621.61 to £1,695.92 on the 10-door triple; £1,040.17 to £1,114.49 on the perforated 6-door triple). Three columns, three times £24.77.

That has a clear consequence, and it is the opposite of what you might assume. Because the price tracks the width rather than the value of the unit, the sloping top lands at roughly 2 to 8 per cent of the price at every size — about 7.6% on the cheapest single-door locker in the range and under 5% on a large nested bank. It is close to a rounding error whatever you are buying. If clutter or dust on locker tops is any kind of concern in your building, take it; there is no size at which it becomes an expensive decision.

Depth: 300, 380 or 450 mm

The width is fixed at 300 mm per column (305 mm imperial). Depth is the dimension you choose, and it is the one people most often get wrong:

• 300 mm — bags, coats, personal effects, school kit. The default, and the cheapest.
• 380 mm — the middle option. Suits a folded uniform plus a rucksack, or a helmet.
• 450 mm (457 mm imperial) — full-size holdalls, bulky PPE, boots, protective suits and helmets together. Specify this for fire and rescue, heavy industry, and any site where a full change of protective clothing has to go in alongside personal belongings.

Depth costs floor area, not just money. A 450 mm bank projects 150 mm further into a corridor than a 300 mm one, which matters more than the price difference in a tight changing room. Measure the aisle before you specify the depth.

Colours

Every locker in the range is available in three carcass colours — Silver/Grey, Black or White — and seven door colours — Red, Yellow, Blue, Green, Black, White or Silver. Both are chosen from the dropdowns on the product page.

Two things people use the colour split for. In schools and leisure sites, door colour is used to zone banks by year group, team or department without any signage. In clean/dirty workflows, two colours mark which side of the changeover a bank sits on. Neither costs anything extra, so it is worth deciding deliberately rather than defaulting to grey on grey.

Wardrobe lockers and single-door formats

Wardrobe locker is the trade term for a full-height single compartment — one door, one person, tall enough that a coat hangs rather than folds. Our full-height carcass is 1800 mm (1780 mm imperial), so a single-door unit in this range gives you that full hanging height.

Here is the honest position on our current catalogue: the only true 1-door full-height locker we stock is the Vision Panel Metric, from £324.04. It has an acrylic vision panel in the door. If you want a solid-door single wardrobe locker, that specific product is not currently in the range as listed — the solid-door ranges start at 2 doors per column. Talk to us before assuming it cannot be supplied, but do not order the vision panel expecting a blank door.

Also worth knowing: our lockers are fitted with a coat hook in each compartment. None of the product data in this range specifies a hanging rail or an internal shelf, so if your specification requires either, ask us to confirm against the manufacturer's drawing rather than assuming it is included. We would rather check than have you find out on delivery.

Locking: what you get, and what you do not

Every compartment in every locker on this page is fitted with a Type A cam lock as standard, with keys. It is a quick, reliable, low-maintenance mechanism and it is what the overwhelming majority of workplace and school installations use.

Three things that are frequently searched for and are not part of this range, said plainly:

• Padlock lockers. "Staff lockers with padlock" is one of the most common searches in this category. Our lockers ship with a cam lock, not a hasp and staple, so they are not padlock-ready as supplied. If a padlock-and-user's-own-key arrangement is a firm requirement — common where staff turnover is high and key management is a burden — say so at enquiry stage rather than ordering and adapting.
• Combination locks and coin-operated locks. Not fitted as standard anywhere in this range. Coin return locks in particular are a leisure-sector product and we do not stock them.
• Replacement locker keys and locks. A large volume of "locker keys" and "locker locks" searching is people who have lost a key for a locker somebody else installed, sometimes decades ago. We sell lockers, not a spares counter. Your fastest route is the lock code stamped on the lock face taken to the original manufacturer or a locksmith — not a locker supplier.

Four things we do not sell

Stated here to save you the enquiry:

• Self-storage. "Storage lockers" mostly means a rented unit by the month. We sell steel lockers you buy and install; we do not rent space.
• Second-hand or cheap lockers. Our entry price is £324.04 for one full-height compartment and £52.89 per compartment on a nested bank. If your budget is below that, the used market and the domestic retailers are genuinely where you should look — we would rather say so than waste your time.
• Domestic and decorative lockers. Searches for lockers alongside IKEA, B&Q or Argos are usually after a small retro or bedroom unit. These are commercial-grade UK-manufactured steel lockers built for daily institutional use, priced accordingly.
• Installation and locker room fit-out. We supply the lockers. We do not currently offer an installation or design service.

Where these lockers are specified

Across the sectors we supply, the pattern is fairly consistent: schools, colleges and universities (sloping tops for clutter, vision panels for safeguarding, door colour for year-group zoning); staff changing rooms and locker rooms (nested banks, 380 mm depth); gyms, leisure centres and swimming pools (perforated doors, near-universally); industrial workshops and PPE storage (450 mm depth, perforated where workwear goes away damp); fire, ambulance and emergency services (450 mm and perforated for full-suit storage); and hospitals, clinics and healthcare (vision panels, and PowerBox where pagers and ward phones need charging).

Note on terminology in industrial settings: what gets called an industrial locker or a workshop locker is usually a standard steel locker at 450 mm depth with perforated doors, sited in a workshop rather than a changing room. It is a use case, not a separate product line — so specify by depth and door type, not by the label.

For a fuller treatment by sector, see our guides on specifying school lockers, gym and changing-room lockers and choosing metal lockers for the workplace.

Benches, and why they are ordered at the same time

A bank of lockers in a changing room almost always needs seating in front of it — people cannot put boots on standing up in a 900 mm aisle. Our cloakroom and changing-room benches are specified alongside lockers often enough that it is worth pricing them into the same job rather than discovering the gap after installation. Our guide to choosing cloakroom seating covers the sizing.

Lead times and delivery

We do not publish a lead time against these lockers, and we are not going to invent one. Probe lockers are made to order in the specified carcass and door colour combination, so the honest answer is that lead time depends on the configuration and the current production position — ask us and we will confirm before you commit. The same applies to whether a given bank arrives assembled or requires assembly on site, and to access requirements: a full-height nested triple-width bank is a large, heavy object and needs to physically get through your doors and up to the floor it is going on. Measure the route, not just the room.

A short specification checklist

1. How many people? Count compartments, not units, and nest wherever headcount allows — that is your biggest saving.
2. What goes in? Coat and bag → 300 mm. Uniform plus rucksack → 380 mm. Full PPE, boots, helmet → 450 mm.
3. Does it go away damp? If yes, perforated doors, for under £3 a compartment.
4. Does anyone need to see inside? Safeguarding or contraband control → vision panel. Staff changing room → probably not.
5. Is there existing imperial stock to match? Yes → imperial. No → metric, and save the money.
6. Flat or sloping top? £24.77 per column of width — about 2–8% either way. On a big bank, take the sloping top.
7. Anything to charge? Work out mains versus USB before specifying — it costs more than the door count.
8. Measure the aisle and the delivery route, then confirm lead time with us.

If you are working through a specification and want a second opinion on depth, nesting or door count, send us the headcount and what people are storing. We would rather help you get it right first time than sell you a bank you have to work around. Browse the full range above, or start from the Probe collection if you are matching an existing installation.