Platform
Know what was billed. Know what was paid.
Carriers do not publish their rates. They do send documents, and documents can be read and counted.
The corpus
239 documents harvested from carrier correspondence across 19 organisations. 169 are estimates a parser could read, producing 6,874 line items. 15 named insurers produced a parsed estimate. Two vendor layouts dominate and they share nothing structurally, so each needed its own parser.
What the labor numbers show
Refinish sits at 2.1–2.5× across 91 documents and body at 2.1–2.5× across 94. Those are the same numbers, and that is the finding: every carrier with a readable rate pays exactly the same figure for body as for refinish. Six of the eight land between $56 and $58, a seven-hundredths spread once expressed against the shop's posted rate.
The $56 number is not universal
The high-volume carriers hold body and refinish near the bottom of the measured range with very little variance. That is not a market rate. A published case on this site shows one carrier allowing $125 an hour on body and paint for the same shop in the same season, on an exotic loss with a liability adjuster attached. Both halves belong on the page.
Carriers take the posted rate on mechanical
A repeated pattern in the documents: a carrier that dictates body and refinish will often allow the shop’s own posted rate on mechanical without argument. It shows up in more than one carrier’s own paperwork, and it is the kind of thing only visible if somebody reads the totals block rather than the headline.
Before you ask
Are these rates negotiable?
The measurements describe what documents showed, not what any carrier will agree to. What a shop can negotiate depends on its market, its volume and its relationships.
Whose claims are in the corpus?
Documents received in the course of running a collision shop. Everything published is aggregate: a rate and a sample size. No VIN, no claim number and no line from any individual claim is published.
How current is it?
The corpus grows as documents arrive, and the figures on this site are computed from it at build time rather than typed, so a page cannot claim a number the corpus no longer supports.
Run it on damage you have already written
Accounts are created by hand, usually within a business day. Bring your own photographs and a repair order you have already closed, so you can see how close it lands before you decide. No card, no trial timer.