Dealer or Independent: The Federal Data Answers It, and the Answer Flips by Trade
Short answer: "do dealers pay better" has two answers and they point opposite ways. Mechanics earn more at a dealer, body repairers earn less.
- Mechanics: yes, and by a lot. A median automotive service technician at an automobile dealer earns $59,920. At an independent mechanical repair shop, $49,630. A gap of $10,290.
- Body repairers: no. A median body repairer at a body shop earns $55,920. At a dealer, $52,040. A gap of $3,880 the other way.
Same country, same survey, same year. The trade decides the answer, and almost nobody splits it that way because almost nobody holds the occupation fixed.
Why holding the occupation fixed is the whole trick
Most comparisons put a dealership's payroll beside a body shop's. That is worthless for this question, because a dealership's payroll includes the sales floor and the finance office and a body shop's does not. You end up measuring commission salespeople and calling it technician pay.
The BLS wage survey publishes estimates by occupation and industry together, which lets you hold SOC 49-3021 constant and change only who employs them. That is the like-for-like comparison, and it is the only public source that supports one.
Body repairers, by who employs them
| Employer | Employed | Annual median | Annual mean |
|---|---|---|---|
| Motor Vehicle Manufacturing | 3,340 | $76,250 | $68,860 |
| Body, paint, interior and glass repair shops | 97,770 | $55,920 | $59,920 |
| Automotive repair and maintenance, all | 109,400 | $54,710 | $59,450 |
| Automobile Dealers | 25,830 | $52,040 | $60,370 |
| Mechanical and electrical repair shops | 10,510 | $50,450 | $56,000 |
| Other automotive repair and maintenance | 1,120 | $46,910 | $50,840 |
| Parts, accessories and tire retailers | 1,340 | $45,000 | $49,590 |
The best-paying employer of body repairers in the country is not a repair shop at all. Motor vehicle manufacturing pays a median of $76,250, more than twenty thousand above a body shop, to 3,340 people.
Mechanics, by who employs them
| Employer | Employed | Annual median | Annual mean |
|---|---|---|---|
| Motor Vehicle Manufacturing | 950 | $69,370 | $68,740 |
| Automobile Dealers | 264,130 | $59,920 | $61,230 |
| Body, paint, interior and glass repair shops | 9,660 | $56,490 | $57,960 |
| Mechanical and electrical repair shops | 208,550 | $49,630 | $55,710 |
| Automotive repair and maintenance, all | 251,720 | $48,370 | $53,690 |
| Parts, accessories and tire retailers | 48,500 | $45,700 | $49,100 |
| Other automotive repair and maintenance | 33,500 | $35,730 | $39,910 |
This is where the folk wisdom comes from, and for mechanics it is correct. 264,130 mechanics work at dealerships, more than at independent mechanical shops, and they earn over ten thousand dollars more at the median. If your experience of the trade is mechanical, "dealers pay better" is simply true.
A footnote worth noticing: a mechanic working in a body shop earns more than one in a mechanical repair shop, $56,490 against $49,630. Collision facilities pay their mechanical staff well.
The median and the mean disagree, and that is the finding
Look again at the body repairer row for dealers. Median $52,040, mean $60,370.
At body shops it is median $55,920, mean $59,920. So:
- On the median, body shops pay body repairers $3,880 more.
- On the mean, dealers pay $450 more.
The two measures point different ways, which they only do when the distributions are shaped differently. A dealer's body repairers have a longer right tail: a smaller group of very high earners pulling the average up, while the typical dealer body technician earns less than the typical independent one.
That is probably why the belief persists. If you know the top earners at a dealer body shop, or you have seen an average, dealers look better. The middle of the distribution says otherwise. Anyone quoting one number here should say which one it is.
Glass installers barely move
| Employer | Employed | Annual median |
|---|---|---|
| Other automotive repair and maintenance | 220 | $50,130 |
| Mechanical and electrical repair shops | not published | $49,910 |
| Automotive repair and maintenance, all | 18,060 | $47,750 |
| Body, paint, interior and glass repair shops | 17,350 | $47,650 |
| Automobile Dealers | 570 | $46,110 |
| Parts, accessories and tire retailers | not published | $45,870 |
From $45,870 to $50,130 across every employer type. Where you work barely changes what a glass installer is paid, which is the opposite of the mechanical picture. Note also that only 570 glass installers work at dealerships at all.
The whole-industry number, and why not to use it
Census County Business Patterns takes a different route: total annual payroll divided by total employment, from administrative records rather than an occupational survey.
| Industry | Establishments | Employees | Payroll per employee |
|---|---|---|---|
| New Car Dealers | 21,910 | 1,131,340 | $79,300 |
| Body, paint, interior and glass repair | 35,029 | 246,720 | $60,721 |
| General automotive repair | 84,859 | 403,389 | $53,031 |
| Retail trade overall, for scale | 1,043,373 | 16,046,207 | $37,746 |
Two useful things and one trap.
Useful: body shops out-pay general mechanical repair by $7,690 per employee, from a completely independent instrument, which corroborates the wage survey from a different direction. And the structural gap is stark: about 7 employees per body shop against 52 per new-car dealership.
The trap: that $79,300 is not technician pay and cannot be made into technician pay. CBP has no occupation dimension at all, so it is every payroll dollar a dealership spends divided by everyone on the payroll, sales floor and finance office included. Anyone citing federal data to say dealers pay technicians thirty percent more is using this number or one built like it. Ask which occupation code it uses; if there is not one, it is not about technicians.
A classification note: CBP 2023 uses the 2017 NAICS revision and the wage survey uses the 2022 revision, so the same industry is 811121 in one and 811120 in the other. Same thing, different vintage of the code.
We checked those payroll figures against a third agency
Census payroll was the least-verified number on this page, so we tested it against QCEW, which is a genuinely independent instrument: a different agency (BLS, not Census), built from a different administrative source (state unemployment insurance records, not Census business registers), counting the same industries.
| Industry | Census CBP | BLS QCEW | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Body, paint, glass repair | $60,721 | $65,103 | +7.2% |
| General automotive repair | $53,031 | $55,359 | +4.4% |
| New car dealers | $79,300 | $83,658 | +5.5% |
They agree on the headcounts too: body shops at 246,720 against 255,721, establishments 35,029 against 35,584.
Both agencies rank the three industries identically, and the finding this page rests on survives. Census puts body shops $7,690 per employee above general repair; QCEW puts them $9,744 above. The independent source makes the gap bigger, not smaller.
QCEW runs a few percent higher across all three, consistently. The two agencies define payroll slightly differently and measure employment over different windows, which is the likely reason; we have not established it and are not claiming it. What matters is that no single figure here depends on one agency's method.
Most people in a body shop are not body repairers
Put the two datasets together and something falls out that neither shows alone.
Census counts 246,720 people employed in body, paint, interior and glass repair shops. The wage survey counts 97,770 body repairers working in that same industry.
That is under two in five. The rest are refinish painters, estimators, parts staff, detailers, service advisers, tow drivers and administrators, each under its own occupation code. We have since put every one of them in a table with its pay: every job in a body shop, and what it pays. The painters are the interesting case, because the federal occupation code for an automotive painter was retired and the survey now files them under a broad manufacturing coating category.
The technician shortage everyone writes about is a shortage in one occupation inside an industry that is mostly other occupations. Staffing a shop and hiring a technician are not the same problem. (The two figures are 2023 and 2025 respectively, so treat this as a magnitude rather than a measurement.)
How this data was obtained, since it bears on trusting it
An automated request for the BLS industry file on 18 August 2026 was refused, with this in the response body:
"Automated retrieval programs (commonly called 'robots' or 'bots') can cause delays and interfere with other customers' timely access to information. Therefore, bot activity that doesn't conform to BLS usage policy is prohibited."
We did not route around it. The file was downloaded through a browser, which is what BLS publishes the link for, and the parser that reads it takes a local path rather than a URL so it cannot drift back into automated retrieval. Our parser for the companion state file re-derives a copy we already held and asserts it matches value for value before writing anything.
Sources people cite for this, and what they actually are
NADA's Dealership Workforce Study would be the industry answer to this question. It is not public. NADA's own page: "Price of the report: $795. You must be a NADA member and login to purchase." We have not bought it and we quote no figures from anyone who has.
TechForce Foundation's Technician Supply & Demand Report is the most-cited industry source on the shortage. Its headline is real: "Nearly 1 million new-entry transportation technicians will be needed" over five years with "less than 25% of the need stemming from growth", the same replacement-not-growth point our workforce page makes from BLS directly. What it is not is an independent measurement. California's Bureau of Automotive Repair, describing an earlier edition, calls it "TechForce's own analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data". Citing TechForce alongside BLS is citing BLS twice.
ASE advertises "20% Higher Earnings" for certified technicians, sourced on its own homepage to unnamed "national data studies in conjunction with a top five auto care chain" and self-reported data from professionals. The chain is not named and the studies are not published. We would not print that number.
State workforce agencies. We checked eight. Every one republishes BLS estimates as a cooperating partner rather than running its own survey. There is no fifty-state alternative to BLS hiding in the states.
What we could not verify
- Why the distributions differ. We can show the dealer body-repairer mean sits above its median while the body shop's does not. We have not established what produces that shape, and flat rate, commission structures and shop size are all plausible without being demonstrated.
- Regional variation in the employer split. These are national figures. The dealer share of technician employment almost certainly varies by state and we have not pulled it.
- The NADA figures, behind a $795 members-only paywall.
- TechForce's full methodology. Its own report PDF was unreachable on 18 August 2026, so our characterisation rests on a state agency's description of an earlier edition and is labelled as such.
- Benefits, tooling costs and flat-rate effects. Wage estimates are wages. A technician buying their own tools is materially worse off than the same number at an employer who supplies them, and none of this data sees that.
Sources
- BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, national industry-specific file (
nat4dandnat5d_6d), downloaded through a browser on 18 August 2026 after an automated request was refused. Occupation codes 49-3021, 49-3022, 49-3023 and 51-9124 against NAICS 2022 industries. Note 51-9124 and not 51-9122: the transportation-equipment painter code is retired, and only the cross with the body-shop industry gives a refinish figure. US federal public domain. Parsed bytools/pull_oews_industry.py. - US Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2023, US totals by NAICS, from the Census flat file, retrieved 18 August 2026. Fields
est,emp,ap. Payroll per employee is our own division: Census measures employment as a mid-March headcount while payroll covers the full year, so it is an approximation. US federal public domain. - BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, 2023 annual, national private ownership, for NAICS 811121, 811111 and 441110, from the QCEW open data API at
data.bls.gov/cew/data/api/2023/a/industry/<naics>.csv, fetched through a browser on 18 August 2026. Used only to check the Census figures against a second agency. US federal public domain. Compared bytools/check_cbp_against_qcew.py. - NADA, dealership workforce study page, for the price and membership requirement.
- TechForce Foundation 2024 report news release, and the California Bureau of Automotive Repair newsletter describing the 2021 edition's method.
- ASE, ase.com homepage, for the earnings claim and its stated sourcing.
- What auto repair pays in every state
- What a collision technician is paid in every state
- What the government count says about the collision workforce
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