On December 22, 2025, the Auto Body Labor Rate Advisory Board issued its final report as required before the end of 2025. The Board’s Legislative mandate was straightforward on paper: Collect collision-repair market data and recommend a “fair and equitable” auto body labor rate.
The result was not a single rate. The Board reported that it reached “no agreement” on a recommendation and issued the report without adopting a Board position on what the rate should be. Instead, the report attaches individual member submissions—competing proposals and analyses—compiled in Appendix H.
For Massachusetts insurance professionals, that procedural detail is the starting point. The report is not a new statewide rate schedule. It is a comprehensive public record that (1) quantifies the gap between what insurers report paying and what shops report charging, (2) preserves the arguments each side will press at the State House, and (3) introduces a set of policy mechanisms lawmakers will be asked to pick from.
This explainer is designed to help you read the report efficiently and use it in real-world claims, underwriting, and agency-facing discussions.
Why the report exists and why it ends without a Board rate
This is not the first time Massachusetts has studied auto body labor rates. Prior commissions in 2008 and 2022 documented longstanding tension between insurers and repairers and debated whether the market would correct itself under managed competition.
The 2025 Board was built to be different in one key way: it was directed to gather specific data points—neighboring-state labor rates, shop costs, labor costs, inflation indicators, workforce trends, and vocational enrollment—and to put hard numbers into the record.
The Board did that. But it did not unify around a recommendation. That is why Appendix H is central. It contains the member-submitted “what we should do now” proposals, without a Board vote adopting any of them.
A critical definition: “registered auto body shops” in Massachusetts
When the report talks about the shop universe, it is talking about “registered auto body shops”—shops holding a registration from the Division of Standards under Massachusetts General Laws chapter 100A.
That matters because the shop survey was sent to the state’s population of registered shops. In other words, the report’s shop dataset is anchored in the regulated shop-registration framework, not an informal estimate of “anyone who repairs cars.”
The Board’s fact-finding: meetings plus two statewide surveys
The report’s backbone is the paired surveys—one directed to shops and one to insurers—supported by public meetings and testimony.
The public meetings
The Board held a State House hearing in June 2025, during which 15 people testified, with shop owners and employees emphasizing hiring and retention challenges, and insurer-side participants warning against government price-setting and its impact on premiums.
The Board also held an in-person meeting at Tri-County Regional Vocational Technical High School in October 2025, focused on workforce pipeline issues. An important nuance: the report notes that none of the speakers identified themselves as a vocational school administrator. So, when the report discusses vocational enrollment and program health, much of that detail comes from the broader record and submissions, not necessarily from administrators speaking at that meeting.
Survey 1: the shop survey (what shops report charging)
The shop survey was sent to 1,497 registered auto body shops through the Division of Standards. After removing duplicates and responses with significant input errors, the Board analyzed 476 “usable” responses—a 32% response rate.
The report is candid about the survey’s limitation: a 32% response rate is meaningful, but it does not prove perfect representativeness. You should treat it as a substantial market snapshot, not a census.
Survey 2: the insurer survey (what insurers report paying)
The insurer survey was sent to insurers meeting the Board’s market-share threshold. Sixteen of seventeen qualifying insurers responded, representing roughly 95% of the Massachusetts private passenger auto market. The insurer survey results are expressed as market-share-weighted averages.
The core datapoint: insurer-paid “prevailing” rates vs. shop-charged “posted” rates
If you read nothing else, read this section.
The report draws a clear line between two different concepts:
- Insurer survey data reflects “prevailing labor rates paid”—what insurers report they pay to settle claims.
- Shop survey data reflects the labor rates shops report they “charge” (often described as posted rates—what they would charge for retail, fleet, or other non-insurance work where they set the price).
Those are not identical transaction contexts. But the gap between them is one of the report’s most important signals.
What insurers report paying
The insurer survey shows a comparatively compressed distribution for body and refinishing labor:
- Body and refinishing labor: weighted average paid rate around $49 per hour, with carrier-reported rates ranging from $43 to $55.
- Mechanical labor performed in the body shop context: weighted average around $55 per hour, with a wider range than body/refinish.
A practical way to read this: insurer-paid body/refinish rates cluster within a relatively tight band across the dominant market-share carriers, even across different carrier business models.
What shops report charging
The shop survey reports materially higher “charged” rates:
- Body labor: mean posted/charged rate around $68 per hour (median $65).
- Mechanical labor: mean posted/charged rate around $108 per hour (median $105).
The report also captures posted rates for specialized work categories, reflecting the increasing complexity of modern vehicles and materials.
For Massachusetts carriers, agencies, and appraisers, the operational takeaway is that the report places into the public record a rate gap that shops will cite and policymakers will scrutinize.
Why Rhode Island appears so prominently
The report highlights Rhode Island for a simple reason: Rhode Island requires insurers to report prevailing labor rates to the regulator, creating a readily usable “paid-rate” dataset.
Using that reporting system, the report presents a Rhode Island weighted-average paid body labor rate of approximately $54 per hour, higher than the Massachusetts insurer-survey weighted-average rate.
The report also notes that comparable paid-rate data from other states was not as easily obtainable for the Board’s purposes. That makes Rhode Island the cleanest benchmark in the report—not necessarily because it is “most similar” to Massachusetts in every economic respect, but because the data exists in an accessible, regulator-facing form.
The premium question: what is quantified and what remains contested
The premium impact question is where readers should be most disciplined about what is actually in the report.
The report states that the Board could not estimate the premium impact on its own because it lacked the necessary carrier data (claims, losses, and the allocation of losses to auto body repairs). Instead, it includes an estimate prepared by the Automobile Insurers Bureau (AIB) at the request of insurer representatives.
The AIB estimate is presented as an input into the debate. It states that a $ 10-per-hour increase in the labor rate would correspond to approximately a 3% increase in consumer premiums, under the assumptions and cost structure described in the report’s appendix material.
This is why you will see both sides treat premium impact as “quantified” and “disputed” at the same time: the report provides a specific AIB estimate, but it does not present a Board-adopted premium forecast for any single proposed rate.
Appendix H: The real policy fight, preserved in writing
Because the Board did not adopt a single recommendation, Appendix H effectively becomes the policy battleground in document form. It includes competing solutions and the reasoning offered for each.
Here are the two ends of the spectrum readers will most likely encounter in legislative hearings and stakeholder briefings:
The economist’s framing: a “bargaining market” and an $83 center point
The Board’s appointed economist, Dr. John Kwoka, submits an analysis describing the market as a “bargaining market” rather than a conventional competitive market. In that framing, insurers operate as dominant buyers with substantial bargaining leverage, and the negotiated rate tends to reflect insurer “buyer power” more than symmetrical price competition.
He proposes a fair-and-equitable rate concept centered on $83 per hour, with a broader range discussed above and below that point. Whether lawmakers accept that logic is separate from the fact that the number is now in the public record and will be cited as a data-driven benchmark.
Insurer-side approach: oppose mandated rates; focus on monitoring and process reform
Insurer-side submissions resist government rate-setting and instead emphasize transparency tools, market monitoring, and process reforms—often pointing to Rhode Island-style annual rate reporting or surveys as a way to track prevailing rates without imposing a mandated floor.
Insurer-side positions also emphasize that no U.S. state has established a minimum auto body labor rate and argue that mandated rates would move directly into premiums.
Repairer-side approach: tiered or variable rates tied to capability and cost structure
Repairer-side submissions generally push toward mechanisms that move away from a flat statewide rate and toward a tiered or variable structure tied to shop capability, training, equipment, and technician wage benchmarks with overhead load factors.
In practical terms, these proposals are designed to formalize what repairers describe as a modern market reality: the cost structure and expertise required for complex repairs differ dramatically from shop to shop, and reimbursement systems should reflect that differentiation.
How to use the report: a map of the appendices
If you want to verify numbers quickly or quote accurately, use the appendices as your reference points:
- Appendix B: shop survey questions (what was asked, and how terms were framed)
- Appendix C: insurer survey questions (what was asked of carriers)
- Appendix D: shop survey results (posted/charged rates by category)
- Appendix E: insurer survey results (reported paid rates by category and carrier ranges)
- Appendix F: Rhode Island carrier data and the weighted average calculation
- Appendix G: AIB premium impact estimate and assumptions
- Appendix H: the competing member submissions—economist analysis, insurer position, repairer proposals
- Appendix I: historical material (2008 report) for long-view comparison
What this likely means for Massachusetts insurance operations
For insurance companies, the practical significance is less about the Board’s lack of consensus and more about the report’s downstream effects:
- Legislative pressure is now data-backed.
The report supplies a set of quantified inputs that can support multiple policy outcomes. Legislators can now cite survey results rather than rely on competing anecdotes. - Claim settlement friction risk will remain front and center.
The report documents a clear gap between paid and charged. That is precisely the type of fact pattern that feeds consumer complaints, agent inquiries, and payment disputes—especially when shops use posted rates as the “fair price” reference point. - Expect the next fight to be about mechanism, not just the number.
Flat minimum rate, tiered structure, annual reporting, appraisal reforms, or some hybrid approach—Appendix H lays out the menu. The Legislature’s question is not merely “how much,” but “how do we set it and update it.”
Bottom line
The Auto Body Labor Rate Advisory Board did not deliver a single statewide labor-rate recommendation. It did something almost as important: it built a consolidated record of rate data, benchmarks, and policy proposals that will shape the next round of Massachusetts auto insurance legislation.
If you handle auto damage appraisals or property damage claims, you should expect this report’s numbers—$49 paid vs. $68 charged, Rhode Island’s $54, the AIB premium estimate, and the economist’s $83 benchmark—to surface repeatedly. The only uncertainty is which mechanism the Legislature will choose to reconcile them.
Access the full report: Click here.
