Door and Window Hardening: The Upgrades That Actually Stop a Break-In

The fastest, cheapest upgrade that actually stops a kicked-in door is a 3-inch strike plate screw kit. Under $15, twenty minutes with a drill, and it turns a hollow door frame into something a shoulder can’t push through. After that, a Grade 1 deadbolt and a door reinforcement plate close most of the rest of the gap. Resolution on your camera matters less than most of what’s holding your door frame together right now, which for a lot of houses built before 2000 is a pair of half-inch screws sunk into pine trim.

We’ve walked through this with a lot of readers who assume the weak point is the lock itself. It usually isn’t. A door fails at the frame, at the hinges, or at a strike plate held in by screws too short to reach a stud. Fix those three things in that order and you’ve closed off the way most break-ins actually happen. Not a picked lock, but a foot against a door that was never anchored to anything solid.

What actually fails when a door gets kicked in?

Almost never the deadbolt itself. The bolt is steel; it doesn’t bend. What gives is the wood around it. The door jamb splits at the strike plate because the screws holding that plate are short, and they’re only biting into the jamb, not the framing stud behind it. One solid kick delivers a lot of force to a very small point, and if that point is anchored in half an inch of softwood trim, the jamb splinters and the door swings open with the deadbolt still fully extended.

Hinges are the second failure point, especially on doors that swing outward. Standard hinge screws have the same problem as strike plate screws: too short, not reaching the stud. A door can be kicked off its hinges even with a good lock if the hinge side was never reinforced.

The third failure point is the door itself. Hollow-core doors, common on interior doors and sometimes used as exterior doors in older rentals, can be punched through with a fist, lock or no lock. If your front door sounds hollow when you knock on it, that’s worth fixing before anything else on this list.

The three upgrades, ranked by cost-to-effectiveness

1. Longer strike plate and hinge screws: the highest return for the lowest cost

This is the one nobody skips once they understand it. Swap the short screws in your strike plate and door hinges for 3-inch wood screws that reach through the jamb and into the framing stud behind it. That single change turns “the jamb splits” into “the stud has to split,” and a 2×4 stud doesn’t give the way jamb trim does. A box of 3-inch screws costs less than a fast-food meal, and most people do all three hinges and the strike plate on a Saturday morning in under an hour.

Some kits pair this with a reinforced strike plate, a longer steel plate with more screw holes that spreads the load across a wider section of jamb instead of one small square. The EZ Armor door security kit is a common pick for this because it bundles the longer screws with a wraparound strike plate in one box. Worth the extra few dollars if you’re already buying screws.

2. A Grade 1 ANSI deadbolt: moderate cost, meaningful upgrade

Deadbolts are rated by ANSI grade, and the difference between Grade 2 and Grade 1 comes down to how much force the bolt mechanism itself withstands before failing: impact resistance, cycle testing, how the bolt is constructed. Most builder-grade doors ship with Grade 2 or Grade 3 hardware because it’s cheaper to install at scale. Swapping to a Grade 1 deadbolt is a straightforward upgrade if your existing door already has a deadbolt hole cut, same install process, better hardware. A Schlage B60N or a Kwikset SmartKey deadbolt both cover the Grade 1 category at a reasonable price. We go deeper on what separates the grades in our breakdown of deadbolt grades, including the one spec that actually matters.

If you’re a renter and swapping the whole deadbolt isn’t allowed, a smart lock built to keep your existing cylinder lets you add features without touching the mechanical parts your landlord cares about.

3. A door reinforcement kit or full jamb kit: highest cost, best for older or already-damaged frames

If your jamb is already cracked, painted over a dozen times, or original to a house built in the 1970s, screws alone won’t fully solve it. A reinforcement kit adds a metal plate that wraps around the strike area and sometimes the full length of the jamb, distributing force across a much wider surface. These run somewhere in the $30–$60 range depending on the kit and take a bit more precision to install, since you’re often mortising the plate into the wood so it sits flush. Worth it for an older frame; overkill for a newer build where the wood is still solid.

What tools do you actually need for a weekend of this?

Less than you’d think. A cordless drill with a Phillips bit handles almost everything on this list: the strike plate screws, the hinge screws, the deadbolt install. A tape measure and a pencil help you mark the mortise depth if you’re installing a reinforcement plate that needs to sit flush. A chisel is only necessary for the jamb kit, since that’s the one job that involves cutting a shallow recess into the wood so the plate doesn’t sit proud of the surface.

Buy the screws before you buy anything else. It’s the cheapest item on this list and the one people run out to the hardware store for a second time because they assumed the shorter screws already in the door would be fine. They won’t be. Grab a box of 3-inch #10 wood screws in a finish that roughly matches your existing hardware, and you’ll have enough for the strike plate and all three hinges with some left over.

Should the garage entry door get the same treatment?

Yes, and it’s the door people forget. The door leading from an attached garage into the house is often treated like an interior door even though the garage itself is only as secure as the main garage door, which is usually the least secure entry point in the whole house. If someone gets into the garage, whether through a forced overhead door or an unlocked side door, the interior door is the last line before they’re inside your living space.

Treat that door like a front door: solid core if it isn’t already, a deadbolt, and the same strike plate and hinge screw upgrade covered above. A lot of builder-grade garage entry doors ship with a simple knob lock and no deadbolt at all, which is worth checking the first weekend you tackle this project.

Do window locks matter as much as the door?

Ground-floor windows are a real gap, but they’re a different fix than the door. Most double-hung windows already have a basic latch, and the upgrade is usually a secondary pin lock or a track-blocking dowel rather than a full hardware swap. Sliding windows and sliding glass doors are the weakest point in a lot of homes because the factory latch is flimsy and the whole panel can sometimes be lifted out of the track. A cut-to-length dowel or a $10 track lock closes that gap without any drilling, which also makes it a fit for renters who can’t modify the frame.

Basement windows deserve a separate look if your house has them. They’re low, often out of sight from the street, and sometimes still fitted with the original latch from whenever the house was built. A simple hinged security bar or a secondary lock costs little and takes a few minutes per window, and it closes off an entry point most homeowners never think about until a home inspection flags it.

What about the door itself, not just the hardware?

If your exterior door is hollow-core, no amount of hardware upgrading fixes the fact that a hard enough hit goes straight through the panel. Solid-core or steel doors are the actual fix, and that’s a bigger project, a few hundred dollars and a weekend, or a call to a contractor if you’re not comfortable rehanging a door. Most people don’t need to go this far. Check first: knock on your door around the middle. If it sounds hollow and thin, that’s the real gap, and cheaper hardware fixes elsewhere won’t close it.

Worth mentioning here too: a good safe for anything genuinely irreplaceable, documents, jewelry, a firearm if you own one, is a separate layer that doesn’t depend on the door holding. We cover what to look for in our home safe comparison, including the fire and pry ratings that actually matter versus the ones that are mostly marketing.

Is it worth calling a locksmith instead of doing this yourself?

For the strike plate and hinge screw swap, no. That’s a screwdriver-and-drill job that doesn’t require any specialized skill, and paying a locksmith for an hour of labor to turn screws you could turn yourself doesn’t make sense for most people. Where a locksmith earns their rate is a door with no existing deadbolt bore, since drilling a clean, properly aligned hole for a new deadbolt takes a specific jig and some practice to get right on the first try. A botched DIY bore is harder and more expensive to fix than paying someone to do it correctly the first time.

A rough range for reference: a locksmith installing a new deadbolt from scratch, including drilling, typically runs $75 to $150 depending on your area and whether it’s a same-day call. Installing a lock into an existing bore, without drilling, usually costs less, sometimes under $50, since it’s a much faster job.

Does any of this affect a homeowner’s insurance discount?

Some insurers offer a small discount for verified security upgrades, though it varies a lot by carrier and by state, and it’s worth a quick call rather than assuming either way. Deadbolts alone rarely qualify for anything meaningful on their own; the bigger discounts usually come from monitored alarm systems or smart locks tied to a monitoring service. Still, it costs nothing to ask your insurance agent what they’ll actually credit, and mentioning specific upgrades, a Grade 1 deadbolt, reinforced strike plates, is a better opening than a vague “I made my house more secure.”

Frequently asked questions

Start with the screws. It’s the fix almost everyone skips because it doesn’t feel like an upgrade, and it’s the one that actually determines whether the rest of your door hardware means anything at all.