Why Body Labour Posts At Two Ten An Hour

Body and paint labour posts at $210 an hour. What that hour buys is a trained technician standing in front of the vehicle, but it also buys everything standing behind him. A 35,000 square foot building with doors high enough to take a Class A. Frame anchoring equipment sized for a coach rather than a sedan. A downdraft booth long enough that a forty foot shell does not have to be sprayed in halves. Air, power, extraction, filtration, the licence the state issues to a body shop and the insurance that has to be current before a customer vehicle is allowed inside. None of that appears as a line on an invoice, and all of it is inside the hour.

The other thing folded into the rate is the time nobody bills. Masking a coach takes longer than masking a car by a wide margin, and part of that is not paint work at all. It is protecting solar panels, antennas, awning hardware and a roof membrane that will not tolerate tape residue. Cleaning a booth between colours, mixing and testing a match, and moving a vehicle that needs a second person to spot it are all real minutes that never become their own line. A shop posting a lower hourly number is usually recovering those minutes somewhere else, and the somewhere else is harder to check than a rate on a wall.

Automotive collision work runs on published times. A carrier estimating system knows how many tenths of an hour a specific fender takes on a specific model year, because the manufacturer published a repair procedure and the estimating database bought it. That number is not a negotiation. Both sides open the same book. Almost none of that exists for recreational vehicles. Coach builders assemble on shells sourced from several suppliers, change materials mid model year without renaming anything, and publish service literature aimed at a dealer swapping an appliance rather than a body shop cutting into a sidewall. There is no page to turn to.

What replaces the book is assessment. A technician looks at the construction in front of him, finds where the laminate stops and the framing starts, works out what has to come off before anything can be repaired, and writes hours for the sequence he can see. That is slower than a lookup and it is also more honest, because it describes the vehicle rather than a model average. It is the single largest reason an RV body hour costs more than an automotive body hour. The hour is not more valuable. The work of establishing how many hours there are has to ride inside it.

Assessment on a coach follows a fixed order, and the order is what keeps the number defensible. Teardown first, far enough to see the substrate. Measurement of the affected structure against whatever tolerance the builder does publish. A written list of operations in the sequence a technician would actually perform them, with the vehicle in the state it will be in when he starts each one. Only then do hours get attached. Writing hours before teardown produces a number that sounds confident and then moves, which is worse for an owner than a number that arrives a day after the vehicle does.

The consequence is that a coach estimate has a shape a car estimate does not. Operations chain. Removing a compartment door to reach a hinge pocket is not padding, it is the only route to the repair, and it produces its own refit time on the way back. An owner reading hours for the first time often reacts to the count of operations rather than to the total, because ten lines feels like ten problems. It usually is not. It is one problem described in enough detail that each step can be checked independently.

A shop that will not publish a rate is a shop that sets it per customer, and per customer pricing does not favour the customer. It favours whoever reads the room better. When the number is on the wall and on the site, the only variable left is hours, and hours are checkable against the vehicle. That narrows an argument from two moving parts to one, which is the entire point. An owner who knows the rate can ask the useful question, which is not why is your rate that, but why does this operation take that long.

Insurance billed work sits slightly differently and it is worth saying plainly rather than burying. Carrier negotiated labour rates exist and they often sit below posted retail. The posted rates describe what a customer pay job costs. On a claim, the rate is part of what the shop and the carrier settle between them, and the owner is usually not the one covering the difference. Knowing both numbers exist stops the common surprise where an owner compares a claim estimate against a retail rate card and concludes somebody is being dishonest. Nobody is. They are two different billing relationships.

Padding, where it exists, is rarely a fabricated line. It is almost always a real operation written at a generous time, or the same time written twice under two names. Both are visible to a reader who slows down. The test that catches most of it is asking what physical state the vehicle is in at the start of each line, because operations that overlap in the bay cannot both be billed at their standalone times.

• The same panel appearing in both a repair line and a replace line, which cannot both be true
• Blend time written for a panel that was never opened, on a colour that did not need it
• Setup or access time billed separately on an operation that already includes it
• Refinish hours written for a full panel where only a section was disturbed
• Two removal lines for one part that only has to come off once

Body and paint is not the only rate on the board, and a coach job that starts as body work rarely stays there. Mechanical and electrical labour posts at $260 an hour, diagnostics at $285, and detail at $95. A rear cap replacement touches all four before it leaves the property. The cap comes off at the body rate. The camera, the marker lights and the loom behind it come out at the electrical rate. If a module needs a scan afterwards, that is diagnostic time. The polish stage at the end is detail labour, and it is the cheapest hour in the building.

What an owner should look for is a sheet that states which rate applied to which line rather than presenting one blended number across the job. Blending hides two things worth seeing. It hides whether electrical work has been billed at the body rate, which would be overcharging, and it hides whether body hours have been written at the detail rate to make a total look better, which is not a favour because it comes back as a supplement later. A sheet carrying four rates is not a more complicated sheet. It is a sheet describing what actually happened in the bay.

None of those signals proves bad faith on its own. Estimates are written under time pressure by people, and a duplicated access line is more often a copy error than a scheme. What matters is that an owner can point at a line, ask, and get a sentence back that describes the bay rather than the software. If the answer is that the system generated it, that is not an answer. Ask again, or have a second shop write the same job and compare the operation lists rather than the totals.

There are also jobs where this rate is the wrong tool and we say so at the counter. A scuffed bumper cover on a camper van that is being sold next month does not need a specialty coach shop. A competent automotive body shop at a lower posted rate does the same work with the same result, because a van bumper is a van bumper. What this rate buys is fiberglass, laminate, structural coach framing, forty foot refinish and the systems threaded through all of it. Where a job touches none of that, the premium buys nothing and we would rather say it than take it.