Why Collision Repair Keeps Getting More Expensive: What’s Driving Body Repair Costs Higher in Every Body Shop

13.07.2026

5 mins to read

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Insurers paid out £11.9 billion in motor claims in 2025. Sounds bad? It gets worse. Every quarter since, costs haven’t just stayed high. They have climbed again.

The average accidental damage claim hit £3,699 in Q1 2026- up 8% on the previous quarter, not the previous year.

Five things are pushing that curve. Only one is a parts problem. The other four are not the ones you’d guess.

The car changed. The workforce has not caught up

Modern vehicles carry cameras, radar, sensors and other electronics in the exact panels most likely to get hit in an accident: bumpers, windscreens, wing mirrors, grilles. Knock one out of alignment, and it is no longer a cosmetic repair. It’s a diagnostic and recalibration job that needs a level floor, target boards, and a technician trained to do it properly.

Thatcham Research puts a number on the trend: the average repair bill rose 50% between 2019 and 2024, driven largely by technological advancement and the specialist skills modern vehicles demand. At one Norwich body shop, EASR, roughly 65% of all work now involves some form of ADAS calibration, which is exactly why the owner expanded to a second site just to handle it. That’s not an outlier but where every repair shop, including those operating within dealerships, is heading, whether they have got the staff for it or not.

What’s Really Driving Collision Repair Costs Up

Strip away the noise and the cost increase comes from a handful of specific pressures:

Vehicle complexity. Repairs now routinely involve diagnostics and calibration steps that did not exist a decade ago, and the ABI names this directly as a driver of claims inflation.
Technician scarcity. The ABI has stated plainly that a shortage of skilled technicians is slowing car repair times and further inflating costs, highlighting the growing impact of workforce shortages across the industry.
A widening skills gap. The IMI reported that apprenticeship starts across key repair pathways have declined, leaving employers, specifically, struggling to find paint technicians and glaziers.
Rising wage pressure. Vehicle paint technician salaries are up 28% over two years, and body repair and paint remain the sector’s most acute shortages across the auto body repair industry. Vacancies have fallen too, but that’s fewer roles advertised per employer, not less demand. Shortages of experienced, workshop-ready technicians are still limiting workshop capacity.
ADAS certification gaps. Just 3% of UK technicians hold an ADAS qualification — 10,695 people. The sector may need more than 220,000 technicians by 2032 as Level 2 autonomy reaches 85% of the car parc, leaving a projected shortfall of more than 190,000 technicians by 2035.

None of this is a pricing story on its own. It is a capacity story wearing a pricing story’s clothes.

The workforce math nobody is fixing

Every quarter, the IMI tracks who is joining the accident and repair sector and who is leaving it. The problem is not a lack of interest from young people, or a training bottleneck. It is simple arithmetic: more people leave every year than join.

Metric	Figure
UK Accident & Repair workforce, total	~59,500 workers
Workers leaving the sector every year	~4,700
New entrants joining every year	~3,000
Net annual shortfall	~1,700 workers
Share of A&R roles that are hands-on technical	~70%

Every year, the sector loses more people than it replaces. That is not a training problem you can solve by Christmas but a structural gap that compounds every quarter it goes unaddressed.

Why this is a staffing problem, not just a pricing problem

An auto repair shop can absorb higher parts costs or pass them through an insurance agreement. What it cannot do is absorb a job it does not have the certified staff to complete.

Nick Connor, CEO of the IMI, put it directly in May 2026: the entire motor claims system depends on a workforce skilled for current and new technologies, and employers are not currently recruiting or retaining talent fast enough in key parts of the accident repair ecosystem. Vehicle software updates compound the problem too. A calibration done correctly at handover can be superseded by an over-the-air update.

Every driver above points back to the same constraint. Calibration needs a technician trained on it. Rising wages exist because those technicians are scarce. Cheaper OEM parts, aftermarket parts, or a leaner paint shop will not fix that.

What this means for the year ahead

Costs are not softening. The IMI is calling for coordinated action on new entrants and training realignment, but that is a multi-year fix. It will not help the fleet contract sitting on your desk this quarter.

The shops protecting their margins are not waiting for that fix to arrive. They are building calibration and diagnostic capability into their workforce now, before the next contract arrives, not after. That is the difference between a bodyshop that can provide an accurate repair estimate and quote a job, and one that has to turn it down.

If you are turning away calibration-heavy work because you do not have the technicians certified to run it, you do not have a pricing problem. You have a staffing gap. Talk to Meenz. We spend every day placing the panel beaters, paint sprayers and calibration-capable technicians that close it.