What Auto Repair Pays in Every State: Body, Mechanical and Glass, Side by Side
Short answer: the federal government counts three separate auto-repair occupations, and they do not track each other. Body, mechanical and glass are three different pay curves inside the same shop, and this page puts all three beside each other in every state.
| Occupation | Employed across the 51 | Median pay range | Spread |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mechanics (SOC 49-3023) | 704,640 | West Virginia $37,660 to District of Columbia $68,660 | 1.82x |
| Body repairers (SOC 49-3021) | 149,310 | Kentucky $46,080 to Rhode Island $72,490 | 1.57x |
| Glass installers (SOC 49-3022) | 20,110 | Georgia $36,430 to Connecticut $63,880 | 1.75x |
Every figure on this page is the May 2025 release, which is one release newer than the number almost every article about technician pay is still quoting.
Which pays more is a question with fifty-one different answers
Nationally, collision work pays better than mechanical work. That is not true everywhere, and it is not close to true everywhere.
In 34 jurisdictions a body repairer's median is higher. In 17 the mechanic's is.
The seventeen where mechanics come out ahead: Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, New York, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia and Wyoming.
The two ends of that:
- Rhode Island is the biggest gap in the body repairer's favour, $20,720 a year.
- Delaware is the biggest gap the other way, $9,630 in the mechanic's favour.
A technician choosing between the two trades, or a shop trying to work out what it has to pay to pull someone across from the mechanical side, is looking at a completely different calculation in Providence than in Wilmington.
Every jurisdiction, all three occupations
Annual median pay. Where a cell says not published, BLS did not release an estimate for that occupation in that jurisdiction, which is a different thing from a low number.
| Jurisdiction | Body repairer | Mechanic | Glass installer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alabama | $52,040 | $45,640 | $46,340 |
| Alaska | $61,680 | $60,840 | $52,260 |
| Arizona | $54,510 | $49,570 | $45,670 |
| Arkansas | $49,310 | $44,160 | $45,180 |
| California | $66,860 | $64,980 | $47,710 |
| Colorado | $59,880 | $61,280 | $48,610 |
| Connecticut | $58,220 | $60,220 | $63,880 |
| Delaware | $48,780 | $58,410 | not published |
| District of Columbia | $62,640 | $68,660 | not published |
| Florida | $48,600 | $48,260 | $48,800 |
| Georgia | $51,190 | $49,060 | $36,430 |
| Hawaii | $60,540 | $52,160 | $49,410 |
| Idaho | $49,200 | $48,420 | $48,530 |
| Illinois | $52,020 | $49,170 | $48,860 |
| Indiana | $51,160 | $49,360 | $46,850 |
| Iowa | $49,400 | $50,510 | $45,520 |
| Kansas | $48,920 | $47,790 | $39,900 |
| Kentucky | $46,080 | $44,890 | $45,980 |
| Louisiana | $47,150 | $46,400 | $41,620 |
| Maine | $50,350 | $52,040 | $47,270 |
| Maryland | $56,100 | $57,520 | $47,350 |
| Massachusetts | $59,300 | $60,760 | $58,490 |
| Michigan | $56,880 | $54,120 | $46,860 |
| Minnesota | $60,970 | $58,390 | $47,800 |
| Mississippi | $49,500 | $37,820 | $47,060 |
| Missouri | $60,540 | $49,160 | $47,060 |
| Montana | $57,500 | $58,740 | $47,090 |
| Nebraska | $54,130 | $50,560 | $46,630 |
| Nevada | $60,520 | $48,290 | $47,210 |
| New Hampshire | $52,790 | $59,020 | $52,000 |
| New Jersey | $62,400 | $56,610 | $61,040 |
| New Mexico | $48,260 | $47,300 | $37,470 |
| New York | $47,670 | $54,120 | $50,240 |
| North Carolina | $50,520 | $48,200 | $60,710 |
| North Dakota | $55,160 | $57,360 | $56,280 |
| Ohio | $49,080 | $48,710 | $50,090 |
| Oklahoma | $48,810 | $46,560 | $41,350 |
| Oregon | $60,000 | $58,520 | $57,270 |
| Pennsylvania | $53,660 | $49,800 | $48,350 |
| Rhode Island | $72,490 | $51,770 | not published |
| South Carolina | $53,290 | $48,100 | $46,180 |
| South Dakota | $49,460 | $51,160 | not published |
| Tennessee | $47,460 | $50,290 | $38,420 |
| Texas | $51,700 | $48,310 | $46,550 |
| Utah | $50,200 | $46,570 | $49,310 |
| Vermont | $50,900 | $51,630 | not published |
| Virginia | $57,760 | $59,330 | $47,730 |
| Washington | $58,340 | $57,270 | $60,630 |
| West Virginia | $47,090 | $37,660 | not published |
| Wisconsin | $56,660 | $54,350 | $48,790 |
| Wyoming | $49,200 | $51,330 | $45,970 |
Generated from the registers that back this page rather than typed. Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 state file.
Where the government declines to publish, and why that matters
Glass installers are not published in six jurisdictions: Delaware, the District of Columbia, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont and West Virginia. New Jersey's glass employment count is withheld as well, though its wages are published.
That is BLS suppressing estimates it does not consider reliable, usually because too few establishments reported. It is not zero and it is not low. Anyone publishing a fifty-state glass pay table with a number in all fifty-one rows has filled those six in from somewhere, and it is worth asking where.
Glass is the smallest of the three occupations by a long way: 20,110 people nationally against 704,640 mechanics. Small occupations are exactly where survey estimates get thin.
Six jurisdictions where even the published numbers rest on very few people
For body repairers: District of Columbia (30), Wyoming (200), Alaska (270), Vermont (320), Delaware (340), Hawaii (450).
The District of Columbia is the extreme. Thirty body repairers in the whole jurisdiction. A handful of people changing jobs moves that median in a way it cannot move Texas's 14,070. DC is also the jurisdiction that repealed its repair licence in 2025, so there is now neither a licence to check nor a wage sample worth much.
Four things these numbers are not
1. Not a shop's labour rate. The rate a shop bills per hour covers the building, the paint, the equipment, the insurance and everyone's wages. It is not what the technician receives, and the two get swapped constantly, usually to argue that technicians are paid more than they are. Nevada is the one state that publishes every shop's rate by name and we cover what that survey shows.
2. Not everybody working in a shop. OEWS surveys establishments about their employees. Around one in ten people in the body-repair occupation nationally are self-employed and are not in these numbers at all. Painters, estimators, parts staff and office staff sit under different occupation codes and are not here either.
3. Not adjusted for what it costs to live there. Rhode Island tops the body table in dollars. Whether it tops it in what those dollars buy is a different question and this dataset does not answer it.
4. Not a starting wage. A median is the middle of everyone currently doing the job, including people who have done it for thirty years. A first-year technician is not offered the median.
The number you have probably seen is a year older than this one
Most writing about technician pay quotes the Occupational Outlook Handbook, which gives $51,680 for body repairers. That figure is May 2024 and the page carrying it was last modified in August 2025. BLS published the May 2025 estimates on 15 May 2026, and those are what this page uses.
Both are correct. They are different years. The mistake is quoting either 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 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. Our figures come from the survey's own downloadable state file, which is why they can be checked against a named release rather than a URL that gets rewritten.
What we could not verify
- Why the pattern exists. We can show that body and mechanical pay invert across state lines, and that the largest collision workforces are not the best paid. We have not established why, and we are not going to guess. Anyone offering a confident single explanation is ahead of this data.
- Industry split. The same survey separates dealer pay from independent-shop pay for these occupations. We have not pulled it, so these mix both.
- Metropolitan detail. State medians hide large differences inside a state. BLS publishes metro estimates and we have not used them.
- Cost of living. Not applied, not available in this dataset, and it would change the ranking substantially.
Sources
- BLS, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 state estimates, from the survey's own downloadable state file at
bls.gov/oes/special-requests/oesm25st.zip, retrieved 18 August 2026. Series: SOC 49-3021 Automotive Body and Related Repairers, 49-3022 Automotive Glass Installers and Repairers, 49-3023 Automotive Service Technicians and Mechanics. US federal public domain. - Parsed by
tools/pull_oews_state.py, which re-derives our existing July 49-3021 file from the same download and asserts it matches value for value before writing anything new. Suppression markers are never coerced into numbers. - 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.
- What a collision technician is paid in every state
- 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
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.
- What a Collision Technician Is Paid in Every State (the full range for body repairers, bottom tenth to top tenth)
- What a Mechanic Is Paid in Every State (the same for mechanics, the largest of the three occupations)
- Your State's Pay Figure Is Hiding Your City: Collision Pay by Metro Area (the metro level, where the decision is actually made)