Nevada Publishes All 353 of Its Licensed Body Shops, and Not One Is Flagged Class A
The short version. Nevada is one of the few states where you can verify a body shop's licence without asking anyone. The DMV publishes the whole roster, with name, address, city, ZIP, county, phone and a Class A flag. We paged all eight pages of it on 16 August 2026 and counted 353 licensed body shops. The Class A column reads NO on all 353.
That last number deserves care, and this page treats it carefully below.
Why the roster exists at all
It is not a courtesy. NRS 487.687 says:
The Department shall provide a method on its website or other Internet site by which a person may verify the license of a body shop.
One sentence, added to NRS in 2007, and it is the reason a competitor, a supplier, an insurer or a customer can check a Nevada shop in one click while most states make you ring a licensing desk.
What a Nevada body shop licence actually requires
The definition is broad. NRS 487.532:
"Body shop" means any place where the body of a motor vehicle is painted, fixed, repaired or replaced for compensation.
Note for compensation, and note what is absent: no requirement that the place be a fixed building in the definition itself, no exclusion of mobile or detail operations. The building requirement arrives with licensing, not with the definition.
From the DMV's own requirements form, OBL246:
| Requirement | What the form says |
|---|---|
| Bond | "A surety bond (OBL269) or deposit in lieu of bond in the amount of $10,000" |
| Premises | "An established place of business within this state with a permanent enclosed building, with sufficient space to safely operate the business" |
| Sign, outside | "A permanently affixed display sign with the name of the business in lettering at least eight inches high, formed by lines that are at least one inch wide", plus at least one outdoor "Body Shop Official Sign" from a DMV template |
| Sign, inside | The Customer Bill of Rights sign, from a DMV template, "at least 22 inches by 28 inches in size", where people seeking repairs actually go |
| Fees | $300 new licence, $39 per principal for fingerprints, $25 late fee to reinstate a lapsed licence |
The two signs are worth separating. One is for the street and one is for the customer standing at your counter, and only the second one tells them anything about their rights.
What Class A means, and why the zero matters
Class A is a separate certification on top of the licence, granted where a shop "meets the criteria set forth in NRS 487.652." The DMV's OBL247 sets out what that takes, and it is a serious list:
On equipment: three-dimensional measurement of a vehicle producing a computerised printout, a vehicle lift of at least 7,000 pounds, a computer-assisted four-wheel alignment rack, a 6,000-pound frame repair rack with a bed of at least 20 feet, an engine hoist of 1,000 pounds or more, and both a MIG welder and a resistance welder.
On people: a certified welding technician, and either I-CAR Gold or the ASE Blue Seal of Excellence, plus EPA-approved HVAC training certification.
On cover and compliance: garage keepers' and workers' compensation cover of at least $1,000,000, a federal EPA hazardous waste handler number, and a $300 non-refundable certification fee.
And then two things the shop owes the customer: a computer-generated estimate, and a limited lifetime warranty.
A Class A certificate expires on 30 April each year, and under NRS 487.660 the Director can temporarily suspend or refuse to renew it, with automatic revocation in defined circumstances.
Zero on one DMV system, seventeen on another
We counted 353 rows and every one reads NO in the CLASSA column. That is not a rendering artefact. The column is real: it appears only on the body shop report, not on the rebuilder, garage or dealer reports, which carry six columns and no CLASSA. It is sortable. And it renders the word NO rather than a blank.
So we went looking for Class A shops somewhere else in the DMV, and found them.
The Department runs a second public system under NRS 487.685 and 487.686: the Auto Body Shop Survey. Its 2026 edition received 335 responses, and question 2 asks each shop which speciality category best describes its business. We read all 335 individual responses on 18 August 2026. Seventeen shops selected "Class A Collision Repair Center".
| Category the shop selected | Shops |
|---|---|
| Automotive collision repair | 275 |
| Paint and restoration | 20 |
| Class A Collision Repair Center | 17 |
| Other | 7 |
| Recreational vehicle repair | 7 |
| Heavy truck repair | 6 |
| Mobile paint and dent repair | 2 |
| Aluminium repair | 1 |
Two DMV systems, one saying zero and one saying seventeen. They are not measuring the same thing, and the difference is the useful part:
The licence roster is the Department's record of who holds a Class A certificate under NRS 487.652. The survey is what a shop calls itself. A shop can describe itself as a Class A collision repair centre without holding the certificate, and on this evidence at least seventeen do.
What that means at the counter. If a Nevada shop tells you it is Class A, the two questions are: does the DMV's licence report show a Class A certificate against your name, and if not, what are you describing? Class A is a defined thing with a $1,000,000 cover requirement and a certificate that expires every 30 April, not a marketing tier.
We still cannot tell you whether any shop currently holds the certificate. What we can now tell you is that the roster says none do, that seventeen shops call themselves Class A anyway, and that the gap between those two numbers is the DMV's to explain.
Where the shops are
| County | Licensed body shops |
|---|---|
| Clark | 248 |
| Washoe | 58 |
| Carson City | 15 |
| Lyon | 8 |
| Humboldt | 6 |
| Nye | 5 |
Those six account for 340 of the 353. The remaining 13 are spread across the rest of the state, which is most of its land area.
The survey is the bigger dataset
The Class A question led us into something larger, and it deserves its own page: Nevada publishes, shop by shop and by name, the labour rates each licensed body shop charges. See Nevada publishes every shop's labour rate.
Two more Nevada provisions worth knowing
Storage charges are regulated. NRS 487.68701 lets a body shop impose a reasonable storage charge but bars it for any day when the vehicle is being repaired, inspected, test driven or otherwise worked on by the shop, and for any day it is being inspected or worked on by the insurer. Most states leave that to the invoice.
There is a public survey mechanism. NRS 487.685 and 487.686 provide for an online survey completed by body shops, compiled into a report made available to the public. We have not read the compiled report and make no claim about what is in it.
Method, and what we did not do
The roster is an ASP.NET report with no export button, paginated at 50 rows per page across 8 pages. We paged it in a browser and counted the rows in the grid, using the report's own paging rather than any scraped index. The report carries its own Run Date of 2026-08-16, which is the date the figures belong to, not the date we read them.
We did not verify the 353 against any second source. It is one report, read once.
We did not read NRS 487.652 in full. The Class A criteria above come from the DMV's own OBL247 form, which states them as requirements. The statutory section is the authority the form points to.
Sources
- NRS chapter 487, read on 18 August 2026 from leg.state.nv.us: § 487.532 (body shop defined), § 487.652 and § 487.656 (Class A certification and its 30 April expiry), § 487.660 (suspension and refusal to renew), § 487.685 and § 487.686 (online survey), § 487.687 (verification by way of Internet), § 487.68701 (storage charges).
- Nevada DMV, Business Licenses Report, licence type BBDY, run date 2026-08-16, paged in full on 18 August 2026.
- Nevada DMV form OBL246, Body Shop Licensing Requirements, and OBL247, Class A.
- How to verify a body shop licence in Massachusetts
- Body shop licensing, states compared
- How to choose a body shop
General consumer information: not legal, insurance, or financial advice. Requirements, coverage, and practices vary by state, policy, and manufacturer.
Where this fits
Each link says what it is for. We add one only when a reader on this page has a real reason to need that page next.
- The Fourteen States That License Body Shops, Compared: What a Licence Actually Proves (what the other states require, and which of them publish anything)
- How to Verify an Auto Body Shop's Registration in Massachusetts (the same check in a state that makes you work for it)
- Fraud Buys Five Years' Probation. Only One Thing in BAR's Schedule Buys Outright Revocation. (what a licence is actually lost for, where the schedule is published)
- Nevada Publishes Every Shop's Labour Rate, By Name, and Almost Nobody Knows (the same survey, read shop by shop: what each one charges per hour)