Pricing Of Repairs

Auto Repair

Pricing of Repairs

So you decided to pay for someone to repair your vehicle. When you enter the repair facility you see a sign on the wall, Labor Rate $94.00 An Hour and your heart stops beating. Nervously you ask the person, “how much is this going to cost?” The person says about $310.00 dollars. After gulping, you nervously ask “how long is this going to take”? The person says a little over two hours. So in your mind you quickly conclude about $200.00 in labor and the rest in parts.

Its now 9:00AM in the morning when you reluctantly give your approval to do the repairs. A little after 10:00 AM, you are told your vehicle is finished. Great! You think, they must have put a fast guy on the repair and I am going to save about $100.00. You are feeling just fantastic until you look at the bill for $206.80 in labor and $93.20 in parts. Your blood begins to boil and you scream, “HOW CAN THIS BE! YOU ONLY WORKED ON MY VEHICLE ABOUT ONE HOUR?”

Now’s the time for a little education on how this business works. All reputable repair facilities, independents and dealerships alike, have books to look at or software on their computers called labor time guides. Labor time guides are time studies done on many different technicians by the manufactures and independent companies to find out what time it should take an average technician to perform any given repair. These labor time studies are then published and sold yearly to the different repair facilities.

When it is determined what repair is to be done on a vehicle, the owner or manager of the facility checks the published labor time study for how much published time is listed for that repair and multiplies the published time by their posted labor rate. Thus in our story, the published labor time for the job being done was 2.2 hours. Multiply the 2.2 times $94.00 which is the posted facility labor rate and you have $206.80 labor for the job being done.

Most repair facilities do not pay their technicians by the physical time they are there. Most technicians get paid for the published labor hours they complete. The published time listed on our job here is 2.2 hours. That means the technician will be paid 2.2 hours of pay for doing this job. It doesn't matter if the technician spends one hour or two full days doing this job. When the job is finished, the technician is due 2.2 hours of pay as published in the labor time guide So if a time study was done on all these published jobs, how does the job get done so fast?

Technicians are responsible for purchasing all their own hand tools and are experts when it comes to tools. A good technician will study tools like a fishermen studies tackle. When a tool is discovered that is believed to save a little time on the job, a good technician will purchase the tool in order to beat the published labor rate time. It is not uncommon for a good technician to have purchased $18,000 to $20,000 worth of tools. It is also not uncommon for a good technician to get paid 60 hours and more each week for 40 physical or actual hours on the clock. Nor is it uncommon to see a technician paid only 25 hours for the same 40 hours on the clock.

Auto Repair