The slowdown in claims over the past year has eased one chronic problem in the industry: the technician shortage.
Nearly half of about 300 shops responding to survey conducted this summer by CRASH Network said they were fully staffed and had no open positions they were looking to fill — the highest percentage to say that since a similar survey in June of 2020 during the height of the pandemic shut-downs.
Fewer than 1 in 10 shops, for example, said they were in need of a new estimator. Even the need for additional body techs, always the position most in demand at shops, dropped sharply, with just 30% of shops saying they have an opening for one. That number typically hovered around 60% in prior surveys, and never dipped below 50% from 2021 to 2023; even in the summer of 2020, 28% of shops were still looking for a body tech.
Less than 1 in 5 shops said they would hire two or more techs if given the opportunity, and 44% said they wouldn’t hire any. Taken together, the survey findings indicate there are now just 79 openings for a body tech for every 100 shops, far below the 164 openings per 100 shops recorded back in the fourth quarter of 2021.
The percentage of shops seeking body helpers and painters’ helpers, positions also typically in higher demand, dipped to just 11% and 8%, respectively. Each of those percentages is about half what they were a year earlier.
“I can’t afford to hire anyone,” the owner of a large independent shop in southern California said.
“With the low volume [of work], we cannot support more staff at this time,” the manager of an MSO shop in Missouri said.
“Not hiring, but I would interview or hold onto application if they were qualified,” the manager of a mid-sized shop in Michigan said.
In fact, the survey found that collision repair shops have been downsizing employee counts over the past year. The total number of full-time workers at respondent shops dropped 2.9% compared to those same shops in December 2024. The average number of employees per shop — which peaked at 15.1 in the summer of 2023, according to prior surveys — fell to 13.6 this summer, down from 14.9 a year ago. Overall, just 17% of shops surveyed increased their total employee count over the past six months, while more than twice that number (38%) decreased the number of workers on the payroll.
Shops participating in the survey separated their employee counts into two categories: production staff (those who physically work on cars) and non-production staff (those who do not work on cars, including estimators, front office staff and parts managers). The average ratio was 0.53 non-production staff positions for every production position. Two years ago, that ratio was higher, at 0.55, suggesting shops as a group have been laying off more non-production workers than production workers.
Not all shops have shed employees despite changes in work volume. “I have been able to keep all of my staff employed, even with revenue and profit down,” the owner of a large California repair facility said.
At several shops, new hires were not based on the amount of work increasing. “We had to add an additional estimator in order to maintain all of the required DRP processes that are getting added,” the manager of a very large Arizona shop said.
“We added a glass guy to [reduce] sublets,” Andrew Gillip, the manager of a dealership shop in Iowa, said in explaining the increase in the shop’s employee count.
John Yoswick