Collision Repairers and Insurers Clash Over Labor Rate Survey Details

Attention all Massachusetts collision repair shops! Be sure to look out for the labor rate survey being conducted by the Auto Body Labor Rate Advisory Board (ABLRAB) this month as the information collected will play a pivotal role in the hopes of bringing much needed change to labor rate suppression in Massachusetts.

Because data collection will play such an important role in what the Board will ultimately recommend to the Division of Insurance later this year, collision repair Board members Brian Bernard (Total Care Accident Repair; Raynam), Matthew Ciaschini (Full Tilt Auto Body; Hatfield) and Rick Starbard (Rick’s Auto Collision; Revere) pushed hard to eliminate the collection of data related to contractual relationships to ensure the survey would truly represent a competitive market rate.

Board members deliberated the survey questions over a span of two virtual meetings held at the end of May and beginning of June. The bulk of the conversation surrounded whether or not to include language in reference to contractual labor rates with insurance companies as well as fleet and government contracts, which the majority of the Board ultimately voted to include. Bernard, Ciaschini and Starbard were joined by Dave Brown (Massachusetts State Automobile Dealers Association) in voting against including questions about contract rates, which the rest of the Board, sans business community representative JC Burton (Maven Construction), who was not in attendance, voted to include. 

Because the point of the survey is to see what the true competitive market rate is in the state, Starbard stressed the market rate is vastly different than the insurance rate, which is a dictated rate based on both parties getting something out of the agreement. “That is why we are against the language in those questions. Our charge isn’t to find out what contracted rates are; our charge is to find out what the market rate is – what the customer is willing to pay.” 

Bernard also stressed that for these rates to “have any validity and understand what it means, we’d literally have to look at the terms and conditions of each document because there is a lot of subtext that could be written into the words that could affect what that contracted rate would be, and I don’t think we have the ability to share these contracts.” 

“No contract rate can ever be included to identify a competitive rate,” Bernard stressed. “As the creator of the survey, our group really needs to know exactly why we’re asking a particular question. If we don’t know what problem we’re trying to solve, what we’re trying to understand, we shouldn’t be asking the question because we’re just going to get a variety of bad data.” Labor rates determined by insurance companies and embedded in their policy forces a low rate onto non-contract shops, he pointed out. “So, if the insurance rate is less than my rate, it’s not accurate because my rate is still my rate on 100 percent of my jobs.”

Contrarily, Christopher Stark (Massachusetts Insurance Federation) defended his position, stating, “These contract rates are absolutely part and parcel to this unique market that is almost entirely done in some way, shape or form based off of contracted negotiated rates, whether that’s with an insurance company, a consumer, a rental car company or a municipality. We’re just trying to collect all of that data from each of the angles, so we know exactly what we’re looking at with these surveys.”

Although the contract rate concerns raised by the auto body voices at the table went largely unheard, the Board did unanimously agree to include a question that specifically asked if the business performs collision repair work as a result of Bernard pointing out that a large portion of the 1,600 registered repair shops in the state “may be a registered repair shop but not necessarily engaged in the business of repairing cars.” The Board also agreed it would be beneficial to add aluminum rate to the list of rates they sought from body shops via the survey. 

While some on the Board contended there was not a need for an actual insurance survey as “insurance labor rates are available from verified sources,” as Stark indicated,  the Board agreed to poll the insurance companies for their unique prevailing rate structure to ensure the data was available to the public. 

The body shop survey was expected to be shared electronically with registered shops via the Division of Standards with weekly reminders in order to encourage as many responses as possible. The ABLRAB planned to reconvene virtually on July 29 at 2pm to discuss survey analysis and following the June 12 public hearing. 

Visit bit.ly/ABLRAB for more information on the ABLRAB or to view past meetings.

Want more? Check out the July 2025 issue of New England Automotive Report!