Nevada Publishes Every Shop's Labour Rate, By Name, and Almost Nobody Knows
The short version. Labour rate is the most disputed number in collision repair and it is treated everywhere as commercially confidential. Nevada publishes it. A survey required by statute asks every licensed body shop what it charges per hour, by discipline, and the Department of Motor Vehicles puts each shop's answers on a public web page under the shop's own name, with no login.
We read all 335 responses to the 2026 survey on 18 August 2026. Here is what is in there.
The statute that makes this happen
NRS 487.685 requires a body shop to complete an online survey, in a form and with contents the Department prescribes. NRS 487.686 requires the Department to compile the results into a report and make it available to the public.
That is the whole mechanism. No open-records request, no fee, no aggregation agreement, no trade association. A licensing statute with a survey clause, and seventeen questions.
What each shop is asked
Seventeen questions per shop. In summary: ownership category; speciality category; hourly labour rates for eight disciplines; four itemised operation charges; wheel alignment handling; new-parts pricing policy; used-parts, glass and sublet markups; daily storage inside and outside; and region.
Every answer appears against the shop's name.
The rates, across all 335 responses
Medians, with the count of shops that gave a usable figure for each discipline:
| Discipline | Shops answering | Median | Lowest | 75th percentile | Highest |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Auto body | 327 | $74 | $25 | $82 | $250 |
| Structural | 304 | $95 | $36 | $115 | $350 |
| Frame | 292 | $100 | $40 | $120 | $250 |
| Refinish | 317 | $72 | $25 | $82 | $250 |
| Paint and material | 317 | $55 | $25 | $65 | $250 |
| Mechanical | 304 | $145 | $36 | $175 | $300 |
| Aluminium | 264 | $120 | $42 | $140 | $300 |
| Glass | 198 | $75 | $1 | $90 | $220 |
Read the spread rather than the median. Auto body labour runs from $25 to $250 an hour inside one state, self-reported to the state's own regulator in the same survey window. Anyone who tells you there is a prevailing rate in a market is describing a distribution, and this is what one actually looks like.
The first objection to a ten-to-one spread is that it must be comparing different kinds of business, and the file answers that rather than waving it off. Narrow to the 273 shops that describe themselves as automotive collision repair, and drop the RV, heavy-truck, mobile-dent and paint-only operations entirely, and the range is still $25 to $250 with a median of $72. The floor is a dealership body shop in Washoe County, Dolan Lexus, at $25. The ceiling is an independent in Clark County, Universal Motorcars, at $250. Both filed with the same regulator in the same window, answering the same question.
Two cautions on that, because the numbers invite a conclusion they do not support. These are posted rates a shop filed with the DMV, not what any customer or insurer actually paid, and a dealership's posted body rate is not a claim about what a repair costs there. And the survey does not ask what a rate includes, so a $25 hour and a $250 hour are not necessarily an hour of the same work. What the file supports is narrower and still worth having: there is no single Nevada rate, and the shops themselves say so in writing.
Glass is the interesting column. Only 198 of 335 shops quote a glass rate at all, and 133 answer "service not offered". Two in five licensed Nevada body shops do not do glass. That is worth knowing before assuming a body shop is the place a windshield gets handled, and it is a piece of market structure nobody publishes anywhere else.
Storage, which is where claims actually get expensive
| Charge | Shops answering | Median per day | Highest |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inside storage | 297 | $110 | $550 |
| Outside storage | 287 | $90 | $250 |
A car sitting for three weeks inside at the median is a $2,310 line item, and at the top of the range it is $11,550. Storage is the number most likely to be argued about after a total loss, and Nevada is the only place we have found where you can look up in advance what a specific shop charges for it.
Parts pricing, in the shops' own words
New parts, customary pricing policy:
| Policy | Shops |
|---|---|
| Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price | 266 |
| Other | 30 |
| Increase from MSRP | 20 |
| Discount from MSRP | 19 |
Twenty shops told their state regulator, in writing, that they price new parts above MSRP. Nineteen said they discount from it. That is not a scandal; it is a pricing choice, disclosed. But it is the kind of thing that is normally invisible, and here it sits in a public field.
Used-parts markup clusters hard: 25 percent is the modal answer at 174 shops, then 30 percent at 44 and 35 percent at 19. Forty-six shops answer "service not offered".
Who these shops are
| Ownership | Shops |
|---|---|
| Independent | 301 |
| Dealership | 27 |
| Franchise | 5 |
| Insurance owned | 2 |
Ninety percent independent, in a market usually described through its consolidators. And two insurance-owned shops, self-declared to the regulator. That category exists in Nevada's survey because Nevada thought to ask.
By region: 230 responses from Clark County and 58 from Washoe, with the remaining 47 from Carson City and the rural counties, matching the percentages the Department publishes in its own summary.
Two sections of the state's own report are broken
The Department's summary page presents four sections. Section I (ownership, category, geography) renders. Section IV (the list of participating shops) renders.
Sections II and III do not. Those are the two that carry the labour rate comparisons across the four geographic areas, and the storage charges. Both return a Report Viewer Configuration Error, a server misconfiguration message naming a missing ASP.NET handler registration.
So the state collects the most commercially significant numbers in the industry, publishes them per shop, and its own aggregate view of them has been broken. The per-shop pages work. The summary of them does not. Every figure on this page was computed by reading the 335 individual responses, because the state's own comparison tables would not load.
How to look up a specific shop
Open the survey results page, go to Section IV, and find the shop by name. Each name is a link to that shop's own answers. There is no login and no fee.
Check the year. The page is headed 2026 and records responses received between 1 March and 30 April. A rate quoted in that window is not necessarily the rate today.
Check whether they answered at all. 335 shops responded. The licence roster carried 353 shops when we read it on 18 August 2026, dated 16 August. The two numbers come from different dates and different systems, so treat the difference as approximate rather than as a precise count of non-responders.
What this page does not claim
That these rates are what insurers pay. They are what shops say they charge. The gap between a posted rate and a negotiated one is the entire subject of most labour-rate disputes, and this survey does not measure it.
That the numbers are audited. They are self-reported to a licensing authority. That makes them attributable and dated, not verified.
That other states do this. We have not surveyed the other jurisdictions for equivalents, and this page makes no claim about how many do.
The whole thing, machine-readable
We read all 335 responses and published them as one file: /api/nevada-body-shop-survey.json, CC BY 4.0, filterable by category and region. Every row carries the shop name, ownership, category, the eight hourly rates, both storage charges and the parts and sublet markups, exactly as that shop answered.
It is rebuilt by a script in the repository rather than typed, so next year's survey is one command rather than another read-through.
One limit worth stating plainly. The Department paginates its respondent list behind a form postback, and that postback is refused to non-browser clients: four attempts from a script were refused at the network level while the identical request from a browser on the same machine succeeded. So the list of shops is collected in a browser once and committed, and the builder reads it. We did not try to defeat the refusal, and if the Department would rather this were not collected at all, the contact route is on their own page.
Sources
- NRS 487.685 and NRS 487.686, read on 18 August 2026 from leg.state.nv.us.
- Nevada DMV, 2026 Auto Body Shop Survey, results page and all 335 individual shop response pages, read on 18 August 2026 from dmvapp.nv.gov. Every figure above was computed from those 335 responses.
- Nevada DMV, Business Licenses Report, licence type BBDY, run date 16 August 2026, for the 353 licensee figure.
- Nevada publishes all 353 of its licensed body shops
- Estimate line items, decoded
- When insurance will not pay for a proper repair
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.
- Nevada Publishes All 353 of Its Licensed Body Shops, and Not One Is Flagged Class A (the licence roster the survey sits beside, and the Class A discrepancy between them)
- Estimate Line Items Decoded: Labour Types, Part Codes and the Operations People Miss (what the rates on your own estimate are meant to be paying for)
- When Insurance Won't Pay for a Proper Repair: ADAS, OEM Procedures, and Your Options (the argument a published rate is evidence in)