16,000 Openings a Year, 3,500 New Jobs a Decade: The Technician Shortage Is a Replacement Problem
The short version. The most quoted figure about the collision workforce is that the industry needs about 16,000 people a year. That is a real number from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. What almost nobody quotes is the sentence next to it, which explains that most of those openings exist because people are leaving, not because jobs are being created. Projected growth over the whole decade is 3,500 jobs, about 350 a year.
Get that backwards and you have inverted the meaning of the entire dataset. The shortage is not a demand story. It is a replacement story.
What BLS actually publishes
From the Occupational Outlook Handbook entry for Automotive Body and Glass Repairers, current figures:
Employment, 2024: 193,000 jobs.
Projected growth, 2024 to 2034: 2 percent, which BLS describes as slower than the average for all occupations.
Numeric change over the decade: 3,500.
Typical entry-level education: high school diploma or equivalent.
Median annual wage, May 2024: $51,680 for automotive body and related repairers. $47,260 for automotive glass installers and repairers.
Those last two are reported separately by BLS and should stay separate. Merging them produces a figure that describes nobody.
The sentence that changes what 16,000 means
BLS, in its own words:
About 16,000 openings for automotive body and glass repairers are projected each year, on average, over the decade. Most of those openings are expected to result from the need to replace workers who transfer to different occupations or exit the labor force, such as to retire.
Subtract the growth. Three thousand five hundred new jobs across ten years is roughly 350 a year. Against about 16,000 annual openings, that means the overwhelming majority of the hiring the industry does every year is to stand still.
Calling 16,000 "new jobs" is the error. It is a turnover figure with a small growth component, and reading it as expansion produces exactly the wrong strategy: it makes the problem look like a pipeline problem, when the number is telling you it is a retention and replacement problem.
What BLS says about demand, in both directions
The outlook section does not give a one-way story, and neither should anyone quoting it.
Downward pressure. New vehicle safety features designed to prevent collisions may reduce demand for these workers. That is BLS reaching the same conclusion the largest consolidator puts in its SEC filings: see what Boyd's filings say, where management plans around an approximate 2 percent decline in repairable claims.
Upward pressure. As vehicles carry more cameras and sensors, repairers will be needed to work around those technologies during windshield, window and body damage repairs.
The net of the two, in BLS's own projection, is 2 percent over ten years. Fewer crashes, more complexity per crash, and the two roughly cancel.
Where the work is
Industry distribution for automotive body and related repairers, 2024:
| Industry | Share |
|---|---|
| Automotive body, paint, interior and glass repair | 57% |
| Automobile dealers | 16% |
| Self-employed workers | 10% |
| Automotive mechanical and electrical repair and maintenance | 6% |
The dealer share is the one worth noticing. Roughly one in six of these jobs is not in an independent body shop at all.
The wage figure above is two vintages old, and that is BLS's doing, not ours
The Occupational Outlook Handbook is where almost everyone gets these numbers, and its wage figures for this occupation are May 2024. The page itself was last modified 28 August 2025.
Meanwhile the survey those wages come from has moved on. BLS published the May 2025 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics estimates on 15 May 2026, and the OEWS tables page carries that modification date. So on the day you are reading this, the most recent wage estimate BLS has published for automotive body repairers is a year newer than the one the Handbook is showing you, and a year newer than the one quoted above.
We have left the Handbook figures in place rather than mixing vintages, and labelled them. What matters for anyone citing this: say which release your number is from. "$51,680" without "May 2024" beside it will be quoted for years after it stops being the current figure, which is how a 2022 number ends up in a 2026 trade article.
A practical warning if you go looking for the newer numbers. BLS has moved its occupation and state profiles into a JavaScript application at data.bls.gov/oes. The old static addresses, the bls.gov/oes/current/oes493021.htm pattern that most citations point at, now redirect to the tables index and serve no data. Links in older articles that appear to cite a specific occupation page are therefore pointing at something that no longer says what they claim. We confirmed the redirects ourselves on 18 August 2026. The way round it is the flat file: BLS still publishes the whole survey as a downloadable spreadsheet, and that is where our own state figures come from. Cite the release, not a URL that will be rewritten.
Four ways this data gets misused, and one thing that is not this data at all
Quoting openings as growth. Covered above, and it is the big one.
Merging body and glass wages. BLS reports two medians because they are two occupations with different pay. There is no single "collision technician median wage" in this dataset.
Treating the median as a starting wage. A median is the middle of everyone currently doing the job, including people who have done it for thirty years. It is not what a first-year technician is offered.
Quoting a national median as if it were your state's. The highest-paying state pays a body repairer 57 percent more than the lowest. A national median is the wrong answer nearly everywhere, and the figures on this page are national. Your state's number is in what a collision technician is paid in every state, all 51 jurisdictions from the May 2025 release.
And one that is not a misuse at all: a shop's posted labour rate is not technician pay. It is what the shop bills per hour, out of which come the building, the paint, the equipment, the insurance and everyone's wages. Nevada is the one state that publishes every shop's rate by name, and we cover what that survey actually shows. The two numbers get swapped constantly, usually to argue that technicians are paid more than they are.
What we did not verify
Apprenticeship programme counts. We opened apprenticeship.gov's occupation listing for 49-3021.00 in a browser on 18 August 2026, and it renders. What it contains is not a count: it records that Automotive Body and Related Repairers is a Registered Occupation, vetted by industry and approved by the U.S. Department of Labor for use in a Registered Apprenticeship Program, under three approved occupational titles: Truck Body Builder, Automobile Body Repairer, and Service Mechanic (Auto Mfg), each with its own Work Process Schedule. A national count of registered programmes for the occupation is not published on that page. The Partner Finder searches sponsors, educators and other partners rather than publishing a programme total, so we still make no claim about how many programmes exist.
Industry-specific wage detail. OEWS publishes wages by industry for occupation 49-3021, which would separate dealer pay from independent shop pay. We did not pull it, and the figures above are the occupation-wide medians.
State-level pay is not on this page, and it is not a gap. It has its own: what a collision technician is paid in every state, all 51 jurisdictions from the May 2025 OEWS release. The figures on this page are national and should not be read as local.
Sources
- BLS, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Automotive Body and Glass Repairers, bls.gov, read on 18 August 2026, page last modified 28 August 2025. Every figure and both quoted passages above are from that page. Wage figures are May 2024; employment is 2024; projections are 2024 to 2034.
- BLS, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics tables, bls.gov/oes/tables.htm, read on 18 August 2026. Current release is May 2025, page last modified 15 May 2026. This is the source of the vintage gap described above. The occupation and state profiles it links to are served from
data.bls.gov/oes, not from static pages. - Wage detail is also published under OEWS occupation 49-3021, cited but not quoted here.
- What Boyd's SEC filings say about consolidation
- Modern cars crash better and repair worse
- ADAS calibration, explained
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.
- 1,300 Locations and 30,000 to Go: What Boyd's SEC Filings Say About Consolidation (the same fall in repairable claims, seen from inside a filing)
- Modern Cars Crash Better and Repair Worse, and That Is One Decision, Not Two (the technology behind both the falling volume and the rising complexity)
- What Auto Repair Pays in Every State: Body, Mechanical and Glass, Side by Side (what the three occupations actually pay, state by state, rather than nationally)