What carriers actually pay for labor

Allowed body rate, against this shop's posted rate

The bar is what the carrier allows per body labor hour, read off its own estimate. The marked line is Corsa Automotive's posted retail rate, disclosed here because a page about the gap is unreadable without both halves of it. The count on the right is how many separate documents the rate was read off.

The measured rates

The shop's own row is a posted rate, not a measurement, so it carries no document count. Every other row is read off documents the carrier wrote.

The tight cluster is the finding

Carriers who do not talk to each other arrive independently at almost the same body and refinish allowance, inside a spread of $9 an hour across 8 of them. That is the part that is hard to fake and hard to argue with, and it holds even though the documents behind each carrier are not evenly distributed.

What it does not settle is whether any of those numbers is right for a given repair. A rate table is what a carrier will allow before anyone has argued. The gap between the allowance and a shop's own posted rate is arithmetic, printed above, and closing it is a negotiation this page has nothing to say about.

How these were read

Primary documents. The rate table printed on each carrier estimate, read off the document. No carrier published these and none was asked.

1. 1Each parsed estimate carries a rate table. Body and refinish are read as separate figures, because they are separate figures even when they match.
2. 2The hours column is not a rate. An earlier pass read 34.6 as USAA’s body rate; it was the hours on a line reading "34.6 hrs @ $60.00". Every rate here was confirmed against the dollar column.
3. 3A carrier’s figure is only published when the same rate appears across its documents. Where a category varied, it is omitted rather than averaged.
4. 4The document count behind each carrier is printed beside it, so a thin figure is visible as thin.
5. 5The shop’s own posted rates are stated once in the codebase and rendered here from that same constant, so the comparison cannot drift from what the estimator actually charges.

What the words mean

Body rate

The hourly labor rate a carrier allows for metal and structural work, as printed on its own estimate.

Refinish rate

The hourly rate allowed for paint labor. Not the same figure as body, even where the two match.

Documents

How many separate carrier estimates the rate was read off. This is the sample size for the row.

Posted retail rate

What Corsa Automotive charges a customer paying directly. It is the shop’s own published rate, disclosed by the shop, and it is the baseline the multiple is calculated against.

Multiple of retail

The shop’s posted rate divided by the carrier’s allowed rate. It says how far apart the two numbers are and nothing about who is right.

What these rates cannot tell you

• One carrier supplies roughly half the documents. The spread across carriers is real; the weight behind each carrier is not equal.
• Some carriers are published off fewer than three documents. Those rows are hints about that carrier rather than measurements of it, and they are marked as such in the table.
• Mechanical labor is deliberately not published. After the shop’s own rate was removed from the corpus, what remained read like dealer sublet rather than a carrier labor rate, and too few documents produced a usable figure. It is used internally with that caveat attached and it must not be quoted as a measured carrier rate.
• A printed rate is not the whole story. Concessions, agreed supplements and negotiated departures from the rate table do not appear in the rate table.
• These are Orlando rates from this window. They are not national, and they are not permanent.
• Every document came through one collision and mechanical shop in Orlando, Florida. Rates, part prices and adjuster behaviour are regional, and nothing here is a national figure.
• The vehicle mix is the shop’s mix, which runs heavily to European and exotic cars. A dataset built in a shop that sees mostly domestic sedans would not look like this one.
• Estimator accuracy against settled claims is not measured and no accuracy figure is published anywhere on this site.

In plain English

Body and refinish allowances cluster tightly in the fifties across carriers that do not talk to each other, which is the part worth trusting. How far that sits from any given shop’s own rate is arithmetic, and the arithmetic is printed rather than described.

Rates last confirmed 8 August 2026 · page last checked against them 14 August 2026

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