Automotive Body and Related Repairers
What the pay figures show
- Rhode Island comes first for this job on every measure. $72,490 on paper. Still first after tax. Still first at $56,727 once you adjust for what things cost. When the headline and the reality agree, say so plainly.
- For automotive body and related repairers, Rhode Island's $72,490 median is the highest nominally, after tax, and after regional price adjustment, at $56,727. Concordance across all three measures is uncommon and worth stating explicitly, because the absence of a reordering is itself the finding for this occupation.
Compare this career across states
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Pay by state · May 2025 wages · tax year 2026
National median
$54,890
People doing it
149,310
Highest paid
$72,490
RI
Best off, really
$56,727
RI, after tax and prices
Lowest tenth
$36,910
Highest tenth
$87,940
Lowest, really
$35,777
NY
States with data
51
National average
$59,690
mean, not median
Prices where it goes furthest
101.41%
RI, against a national 100
Where this job actually pays best
- Pay for this job is fairly steady around the country. Count tax and local prices and the states bunch closer still, from $35,777 to $56,727. For work like this, where you live changes your life more than it changes your pay.
- About 149,310 Americans work in this job, on a middle wage of $54,890. Big enough that where you live changes the arithmetic.
- Coverage is complete — all 51 jurisdictions publish this, on a middle wage of $54,890. Nothing is missing.
- Geographic dispersion in automotive body and related repairers is moderate by national standards. Tax and price adjustment compress the distribution further, to a real range of $35,777 through $56,727. Where nominal spread is this contained, relocation decisions in the occupation turn on non-wage factors, because the wage differential does not survive the adjustments in a form large enough to drive them.
- With 149,310 workers, automotive body and related repairers sits in the middle of the BLS headcount distribution. The state-level spread described above therefore applies to a meaningful population rather than a niche one.
- Coverage for automotive body and related repairers is complete at 51 jurisdictions. No suppression applies, so the highest and lowest figures above are genuinely the national extremes.
Pay band: Automotive Body and Related Repairers
The national median for this job
50thpercentile, roughly
| Lowest tenth earn under | $36,910 |
|---|---|
| Half earn under | $54,890 |
| Top tenth earn over | $87,940 |
| This salary | $54,890 |
Positions between the published tenth, quarter, half, three-quarter and ninetieth points are estimated by straight line.
Where these numbers come from
| BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025 estimates, time-series bulk download (oe.data.0.Current) | as of 2025-05-01 |
|---|
Steps in Automotive Body and Related Repairers
The national median for this job
$54,890around the 50th percentile
| Lowest tenth | $36,910 |
|---|---|
| Middle | $54,890 |
| Top tenth | $87,940 |
The five points BLS publishes. Nothing between them is invented.
Automotive Body and Related Repairers, state by state
The national median for this job
51states publish pay for this job
| Lowest | Kentucky · $46,080 |
|---|---|
| Highest | Rhode Island · $72,490 |
| Spread | $26,410 |
One dot per state that publishes this job. A missing state means suppressed data, not zero pay.
Best paid, and best off
The national median for this job
| Texas pays | $51,700 |
|---|---|
| Worth, after local prices | $53,203 |
Median pay against the same pay once BEA price parities are applied.
Every state, three ways
Sorted by what the money is actually worth. "Kept" is take-home for a single filer after federal, FICA and state income tax. "Really worth" divides that by the state's own price level, so a dollar in each row buys the same thing. Tap a state to put your own salary into it. States BLS does not publish for this job are absent — that means no published figure, not no work.
| State | Median pay | Kept after tax | Really worth |
|---|---|---|---|
| RI | $72,490 | $57,528 | $56,727 |
| MO | $60,540 | $48,916 | $53,307 |
| ND | $55,160 | $46,501 | $52,501 |
| NV | $60,520 | $50,808 | $52,390 |
| MT | $57,500 | $46,435 | $51,455 |
| AK | $61,680 | $51,740 | $50,868 |
| MN | $60,970 | $48,547 | $49,328 |
| WI | $56,660 | $45,767 | $49,160 |
| NE | $54,130 | $43,914 | $48,590 |
| MI | $56,880 | $45,716 | $48,539 |
| CO | $59,880 | $48,367 | $47,708 |
| CA | $66,860 | $53,590 | $47,601 |
| SD | $49,460 | $41,921 | $47,586 |
| SC | $53,290 | $43,781 | $46,987 |
| AR | $49,310 | $40,435 | $46,741 |
| AL | $52,040 | $41,760 | $46,416 |
| NJ | $62,400 | $50,419 | $46,305 |
| WY | $49,200 | $41,712 | $45,914 |
| MS | $49,500 | $40,065 | $45,898 |
| IA | $49,400 | $40,608 | $45,746 |
| VA | $57,760 | $46,030 | $45,687 |
| IN | $51,160 | $41,807 | $45,352 |
| WA | $58,340 | $49,056 | $45,187 |
| DC | $62,640 | $49,886 | $45,022 |
| TX | $51,700 | $43,721 | $44,992 |
| OK | $48,810 | $39,703 | $44,971 |
| CT | $58,220 | $46,508 | $44,853 |
| PA | $53,660 | $43,648 | $44,768 |
| OH | $49,080 | $40,982 | $44,637 |
| AZ | $54,510 | $45,019 | $44,527 |
| LA | $47,150 | $39,037 | $44,187 |
| NM | $48,260 | $39,849 | $44,088 |
| HI | $60,540 | $47,666 | $43,888 |
| NC | $50,520 | $41,266 | $43,835 |
| ID | $49,200 | $39,958 | $43,706 |
| OR | $60,000 | $45,690 | $43,630 |
| MA | $59,300 | $47,183 | $43,591 |
| TN | $47,460 | $40,314 | $43,576 |
| KS | $48,920 | $39,046 | $43,401 |
| MD | $56,100 | $44,955 | $43,241 |
| WV | $47,090 | $38,696 | $43,104 |
| VT | $50,900 | $41,629 | $43,079 |
| GA | $51,190 | $41,356 | $42,767 |
| UT | $50,200 | $40,282 | $42,401 |
| NH | $52,790 | $44,597 | $42,334 |
| IL | $52,020 | $41,548 | $42,029 |
| ME | $50,350 | $40,558 | $41,770 |
| KY | $46,080 | $37,710 | $41,683 |
| FL | $48,600 | $41,230 | $39,854 |
| DE | $48,780 | $39,234 | $39,530 |
| NY | $47,670 | $38,506 | $35,777 |
Sources and assumptions
- A median is the middle of the range, not a starting salary and not an offer. Half of this job earn less than the figures here and half earn more, and experience, employer and city move an individual a long way from the middle. Nationally the middle earns $54,890.
- Take-home figures for this job assume one person filing alone, with no dependants and nothing going into a pension before tax. Any of those lowers the tax and raises what you keep, so treat these as the plain case rather than your case. Local city income taxes are not included either, and in a few states those matter. In Rhode Island, the best state after tax, the figure works out at $57,528.
- The price adjustment for this job uses a statewide figure, and states are not uniform. A city and a rural county in the same state can differ more from each other than two states do, so treat the real-terms comparison as a direction rather than a precise answer — New York anchors the bottom at $35,777. The wage data and the price data also come from different years, because that is how each is published.
- Figures are medians of the published wage distribution for automotive body and related repairers, not entry-level or offer wages. The national median is $54,890, with half of workers below it; dispersion within a state routinely exceeds the dispersion between states, driven by tenure, employer size, sector and metropolitan area. An individual's position in the distribution is not predictable from geography alone.
- Take-home calculations for automotive body and related repairers assume a single filer with no dependants, the standard deduction, and no pre-tax retirement or HSA contributions. Each omitted item reduces taxable income, so the figures function as a lower bound on retained pay for this household shape; the highest such figure is $57,528, in Rhode Island. Municipal and school-district income taxes are excluded, which understates the burden materially in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and parts of a few other states.
- Real-terms figures for automotive body and related repairers deflate take-home by a statewide regional price parity, which conceals substantial intra-state variation — metropolitan and non-metropolitan price levels within one state frequently differ by more than two states differ from each other. The wage and price series also carry different reference periods, as each is published on its own schedule, so the adjustment is directionally sound rather than precisely dated.