What a Collision Technician Is Paid in Every State

Short answer: a body repairer's median pay runs from $46,080 in Kentucky to $72,490 in Rhode Island. The top pays 57 percent more than the bottom. Every row below is the federal government's own estimate for the occupation, from the May 2025 release, which is one release newer than the figure almost every article about technician pay is still quoting.

By Anthony Braswell for Quorum Industries LLC, The Autobody Directory · Updated 2026-08-18 · How this was written, and what the machine may not do

How this page was produced: Researched, drafted and checked with AI assistance under human direction, and signed off by the named author. How this site is written

Two patterns nobody expects. Two of the four largest collision workforces in the country are in the bottom seven for pay. And the top tenth of the worst-paying state out-earns the typical technician in the best-paying one: a Kentucky body repairer in the top decile makes $80,770 against Rhode Island's $72,490 median. Where you sit in your state's range is a bigger lever than which state you are in, and a map of medians cannot show you that.

The size of a state's workforce tells you nothing about what it pays

The five largest bodies of automotive body repairers, and where each ranks on median pay out of 51:

Texas and California employ within twenty workers of each other and their medians are $15,160 apart. New York has the fourth-largest workforce in the country and the fifth-lowest median pay. Florida is not far behind it.

Whatever is setting these numbers, it is not the amount of collision work in the state.

Where you sit in your state matters more than which state you are in

This is the finding that should change how anyone reads a pay map.

Kentucky has the lowest median in the country, $46,080. A top-decile body repairer in Kentucky earns $80,770. Rhode Island has the highest median in the country, $72,490.

So the top tenth of the worst-paying state comfortably out-earns the typical technician in the best-paying one. Moving state is a smaller lever than moving up your own state's distribution, and every published map of state medians hides that completely.

Nationally the picture is narrower than any of that suggests. Across the whole country a body repairer's 10th percentile is $36,910, the median $54,890 and the 90th $87,940. So the national ceiling is under ninety thousand.

Four states put their ceiling above six figures anyway:

Washington's ceiling is the highest in the country and its median is unremarkable, which means Washington rewards the top of the trade more steeply than anywhere else rather than paying everyone well.

The reverse also exists. West Virginia's 90th percentile is $62,840. That is what the top tenth of the trade earns there, and it is below the ordinary median in California and Rhode Island. A West Virginia technician at the very top of their state's range would be a middling earner in either of those two.

None of those four six-figure states ranks in the top five on median: Nevada is 9th, Washington 13th, Virginia 15th, Maryland 19th.

The widest and narrowest states, measured as the 90th divided by the 10th:

• Widest: Virginia at 3.36x ($36,950 to $124,120), then Washington 3.26x and Maryland 2.98x.
• Narrowest: Massachusetts at 1.71x ($45,200 to $77,400), Wyoming 1.73x, Alaska 1.75x.

A wide state is one where skill, certification, specialisation or shop choice moves your pay a long way. A narrow one is where it does not. Those are different jobs in the same trade, and the median hides which one you are looking at.

Across the whole country the observed range is $28,360 to $133,140, a factor of 4.7. Any single national figure for "technician pay" is picking one point out of that.

Every jurisdiction

Automotive body and related repairers, SOC 49-3021. Three points off the distribution rather than one, because a median on its own only ever answers "what is typical" and that is rarely the question being asked. The bottom column is the 10th percentile: nine in ten earn more than that. The top column is the 90th: one in ten earn more than that.

Generated from the register that backs this page rather than typed. Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 state file, retrieved 18 August 2026. Our parser re-derives the copy we pulled on 23 July and asserts it matches value for value before writing.

How we checked these are right. Three separate ways, because a table of 204 numbers is exactly where an error hides.

1. The page against the spreadsheet, by a second code path. tools/check_pay_pages_against_source.py reads the published markdown above and the original federal spreadsheet, using a different library from the one that built the table and never touching the intermediate file. All 204 cells match.
2. Against an independent republication, every row. O*NET publishes the same survey through its own site. All 51 jurisdictions were read there, blind, by someone not shown our table, for this occupation and for mechanics: 102 rows, 306 figures. 101 rows matched exactly.
3. The arithmetic on the page, not just the inputs: every subtraction quoted in the prose is recomputed from the source and asserted.

The one row that did not match, and what it turned out to be. ONET's California page for mechanics* gave figures about $1,500 below ours. It is serving that single page from the May 2024 release: the page is labelled 2024, and its own national row reads $49,670 where all 101 other pages read $50,620. Our table is the current release. The republisher is a year behind on one state. We have kept the disagreeing row in our verification file with that explanation rather than deleting it, because a check that quietly drops whatever failed is not a check.

Four things this number is not

1. It is not mechanics. This is SOC 49-3021, automotive body and related repairers. Automotive service technicians and mechanics are a different occupation, 49-3023, with different pay and roughly ten times the headcount. Automotive glass installers are a third, 49-3022. Articles that blend them produce a figure describing nobody. If you came here for mechanic or glass pay, all three occupations sit side by side in what auto repair pays in every state.

2. It is not everybody working in a shop. OEWS surveys establishments about their employees. Roughly one in ten people in this occupation nationally are self-employed, and they are not in these numbers at all. Neither are painters, estimators, parts staff or office staff, all of whom sit under different occupation codes.

3. It is not adjusted for what it costs to live there. Rhode Island tops this table in dollars. Whether it tops it in what those dollars buy is a different question and this dataset does not answer it. The same caution applies in reverse at the bottom.

4. The median is not a starting wage, but the 10th percentile is closer to one. A median is the middle of everyone currently doing the job, including people who have done it for thirty years. The bottom column in the table is where the lowest-paid tenth sit, and it is the better place to look if you are asking what someone entering the trade is offered. It is still not the same thing: a low earner might be new, or part-time, or in a low-volume shop, and the survey cannot tell you which.

Six jurisdictions where the sample is thin

Read these rows with more caution than the rest, because the estimate rests on very few workers:

District of Columbia (30), Wyoming (200), Alaska (270), Vermont (320), Delaware (340), Hawaii (450).

The District of Columbia is the extreme case: thirty body repairers in the entire jurisdiction. A handful of people changing jobs moves that median in a way it cannot move Texas's. DC is also the jurisdiction that repealed its repair licence in 2025, so there is now neither a licence nor a meaningful wage sample there.

The number you have probably seen is a year older than this one

Most writing about technician pay quotes the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Outlook Handbook, which gives $51,680 as the median for this occupation. That figure is May 2024, and the Handbook page carrying it was last modified in August 2025.

The survey moved on. BLS published the May 2025 estimates on 15 May 2026, and those are what this page uses. Both numbers are correct; they are different years. The mistake is quoting either one without saying which release it came from, because a dollar figure with no vintage attached gets repeated long after it stops being true.

There is a practical trap here too. BLS retired its static per-occupation and per-state pages: the bls.gov/oes/current/oes493021.htm pattern that older citations point at now redirects to a table index and serves no data. Estimates come from an interactive application or from the downloadable survey file. Our figures come from the file, which is why they can be checked against a specific release rather than a URL that gets rewritten.

What we could not verify

• Mechanics and glass installers by state. OEWS publishes 49-3022 and 49-3023 the same way. We have not pulled them, and nothing on this page describes either occupation.
• Industry split. The same survey separates dealer pay from independent-shop pay for this occupation. We have not pulled it, so these are occupation-wide figures that mix both.
• Metropolitan detail. State medians hide large differences inside a state. BLS publishes metro estimates and we have not used them.
• Why the pattern exists. We can show that the largest workforces are not the best paid. We have not established why, and we are not going to guess at it. Anyone offering a confident single explanation is ahead of this data.

Sources

• BLS, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 state estimates, taken from the survey's own downloadable state file at bls.gov/oes/special-requests/oesm25st.zip, retrieved 23 July 2026. Series: SOC 49-3021, Automotive Body and Related Repairers. US federal public domain.
• BLS, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Automotive Body and Glass Repairers, read 18 August 2026, page last modified 28 August 2025, for the May 2024 comparison figure and the self-employment share.
• The national picture, the openings-versus-growth distinction and the projections are covered in what the government count says about the collision workforce.

• What the government count says about the collision workforce
• Nevada publishes every shop's labour rate, and it is not the same number
• The fourteen states that license body shops
• Your painter is not a "mechanic" under federal overtime law

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.

• Your State's Pay Figure Is Hiding Your City: Collision Pay by Metro Area (the metro figures, because a state median blends a city with everything around it)
• What a Mechanic Is Paid in Every State (the other trade, which is four times the size and pays on a different shape)
• Every Job in a Body Shop, and What Each One Pays (what everyone else in the building earns, and why the technician is not top of it)