Publishing Labor Rates Is Still Unusual and We Do Not Understand Why

When we researched this market before rebuilding this website, we checked every shop we could find that competes with us on RV and commercial vehicle repair in Southern California.

Not one publishes an hourly labor rate. Not one publishes labor hour ranges per operation. Two publish price ranges without hours attached.

That is a strange thing to discover, and it is worth explaining why we went the other way.

What we publish

• Body and paint: $210 per hour
• Mechanical and electrical: $260 per hour
• Diagnostics, scan and programming: $285 per hour, one hour minimum, refundable as a credit against an authorized repair
• Detail: $95 per hour
• Paint materials: $55 per paint hour
• Body materials: $5 per body hour
• Hazmat and disposal: $45
• Parts markup: 100 percent up to $100, 35 percent above $100
• Sales tax: 7.75 percent on parts and materials only, never on labor
• Estimate fees: $150 RV systems evaluation, both refundable as repair credit
• Deposits: 50 percent over $2,000, additional 25 percent where parts exceed $10,000
• Card surcharge: 3.5 percent over $1,000

Plus a dollar range and a labor hour range for every operation we perform, across every vehicle category. Rates updated January 2026.

Why the hour ranges matter more than the dollar ranges

Because dollars without hours are unverifiable.

A shop saying a repair costs $6,000 has told you almost nothing. A shop saying a repair takes 25 to 40 labor hours at $210 per hour has told you what the work is, and you can compare that against another shop's hours for the same operation.

That is the comparison that actually protects a customer, and it is the one nobody in this market enables.

What it costs us

Genuine things, so this does not read as pure virtue.

We lose price shopping calls. Somebody who wants the cheapest number can find a shop that will not tell them a rate and will quote a smaller scope. We do not win that comparison and we never will.

Competitors can see our rates. They can. In practice this matters less than it sounds, because a rate is not a business model, and undercutting a published rate while scoping smaller is what most of them already do.

We cannot flex the rate. Which is the point, but it does mean we cannot do somebody a quiet favour on rate. We can and do adjust scope, and we tell people when a smaller scope is genuinely the right answer, but the rate is the rate.

It commits us to updating it. A published rate that is stale is worse than no published rate. That is an ongoing discipline.

What it changes

Rate stops being a negotiation. On an insurance claim this is the single biggest effect. An adjuster comparing our figure to a market rate can look ours up on a public website. That removes the most common source of friction in claim conversations entirely.

Municipal and fleet procurement gets simpler. A department defending a repair spend against publicly posted rates has a much shorter internal conversation than one defending a private quote. Departments tell us this repeatedly and it is the thing they mention first.

Customers can evaluate a scope. Which means a customer who reads our prices page and then reads three estimates can tell which one is a smaller job rather than a better price.

We have to be right about hours. If we publish 46 hours for an operation and habitually book 70, that is visible. It is a discipline that improves estimating.

Why we think nobody else does it

Two reasons, and only one of them is uncharitable.

The charitable one: ranges on this work are genuinely wide, because extent on laminated and structural damage cannot be known from outside. A shop worried about being held to the bottom of a range by a customer who read a website has a real concern.

Our answer to that is to publish honest ranges with "and up" where it is warranted, and to explain why the range exists rather than hiding it. Delamination repair genuinely is $1,500 to $20,000 and up, and pretending it is a tighter number would be the dishonest version.

The uncharitable one: an information advantage is worth money, and giving it up costs jobs to shops that keep theirs.

That is true and we decided we would rather have customers who understand what they are buying. They make better decisions, they argue less, they come back, and they send people.

The thing we will not do

Publish a rate and then apply a different one.

Every figure on every estimate we write derives from the numbers above. If you find a discrepancy, point at it and we will fix it. That is the whole basis of publishing anything.