Time to Sweat the Small Stuff in Collision Repair

The big, labor intensive jobs are going away – or at least becoming much less frequent.

That’s what Mike Anderson reported recently in FenderBender magazine. He compared the first quarter of 2025 to the first quarter of 2026 and found the number of jobs with 114 labor hours had decreased significantly in 2026. In 2025, roughly 22% of repair orders included 114 hours. But by 2026, that number had dropped to between 8% and 11%.

So where does that leave body shops?

Mike’s conclusion is that profitable estimating opportunities have not disappeared; they’ve just shifted to small and mid-sized repairs. And that means estimators have to know their systems inside and out.

We think there is an important second-order effect: when the jobs get smaller, missing the small stuff is a much bigger deal. And as shops increase the number of small jobs, missing those items again and again adds up to real money.

Shops tend to lose money in two places on an estimate: operations that never get written down and operations the insurance carrier takes off.

Catching the operations at both of those points is critical.

Shops deserve to get paid for the work they do.

Do you want to get paid?

Reclaimr helps collision shops make more money on each estimate. Are you fighting with an insurance company over every line?

Reclaimr checks to be sure every procedure is included and then reviews what insurance cut and generates a rebuttal backed by industry guidelines in minutes – instead of hours.

Check it out here.