Data for Trades

Auto Repair Data · By Anthony Limpert · November 1, 2026

Only 1 Auto Repair Shop in 100 Posts Its Labor Rate

Call ten repair shops and ask what they charge an hour. Most will tell you. Now try to find that number on their websites.

We did that at scale. Our crawler went through 22,085 independent auto repair shop websites, left out chains and dealers, and read 18,181 of them. It looked at each homepage and up to three pages that looked like pricing or services, and it followed every site's robots.txt.

The results, worst first.

207 Shops Out of 18,181 Post an Hourly Rate

That is about one shop in 88. Call it one in a hundred.

The labor rate is the first number a car owner wants, because every repair quote is built on it. It is also the number shops guard the hardest.

The 207 shops that do post it put the median at $129 an hour. The middle half runs $100 to $165.

About 1 in 12 Shows Any Price at All

Widen it to any dollar figure for a service, like an oil change special or a diagnostic fee, and it is still only 1,540 shops. That is 8.5% of the sites we read.

So more than nine shop websites in ten give a car owner nothing to compare. No rate, no starting price, no range. Just "call for a quote."

The Prices That Do Get Posted

When shops post a price, it is almost always for the small, easy jobs.

ServiceShops Posting ItLowMedianHigh
Oil change569$49$69$90
Diagnostic fee504$80$100$150
Smog check262$36$45$59
Labor rate per hour207$100$129$165
Wheel alignment198$79$99$119
Brake pads per axle197$135$180$259
Battery replacement188$110$150$200

Low and high are the middle half of shops that post that service. Independent shop websites only, chains and dealers left out. Crawled October 2026.

Oil changes and diagnostic fees lead because they are bait. They get the car in the bay. The jobs that actually cost money, the timing belts and transmissions, almost never get a number.

The Rate Depends Hard on the State

Where enough shops post a rate to mean something, the spread is big. California has the most, 53 shops, at a median of $160 an hour. Florida's 15 shops sit at $149. Washington's 15 are at $130. Texas, with 13, is at $125.

That is a $35 an hour gap between California and Texas on the same job. On a four hour repair, the customer feels it.

Why Shops Hide the Number

I run a mobile mechanic business in Riverside County, so I know the fear. Post $160 an hour and the shop down the street posts $129, and you look expensive before anyone hears you out.

But hiding it does not make the price go away. It just moves the surprise to the end. In our own job records, the median diagnostic paid was $150, while the shops that post a diagnostic fee post a median of $100. The customer who expected $100 and paid $150 does not come back.

What to Do If You Own a Shop

Post your rate. You will be in the 1% of shops that does, and in the AI answers and search results that now quote real numbers, the shop with the number gets cited.

Then post three real jobs with what they cost, parts and labor together. A brake job, a battery, a diagnostic. Not a range pulled from a national site. Your numbers.

If your rate is higher than the median, say why next to it. Master techs, a warranty, the van that comes to the driveway. People pay more when they know what they are paying for. They leave when they find out at the counter.

The full price crawl, with every posted service and the state breakdown, is part of our data for auto repair on Data for Trades, free sample included.

Anthony Limpert owns Supercanic, a mobile mechanic business in Riverside County, California, and the Shop Desk software it runs on. ASE Business Built With Master Automotive Technicians. He founded Clickflame in 2004 and holds a B.S. in Computer Science from The University of Akron. Full author page.

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