Most shops price a coating by looking at what the shop down the road charges, subtracting a hundred dollars, and hoping. That works right up until you land three coatings in a week and discover you've booked eleven days of labour for the price of six.
The problem is that a coating is sold as a product and delivered as labour. The customer thinks they're buying a bottle. You're selling forty hours of correction, decontamination, panel prep and cure time, and the bottle is the cheapest thing in the room.
Here's a method that survives contact with a real week.
Start from the hours, never the package
Write down the stages you actually perform, in order, and put an honest hour figure beside each one. For a mid-tier coating on a clean three-year-old sedan, a typical Canadian shop looks something like this:
| Stage | Hours |
|---|---|
| Intake, wash, decontamination | 2.0 |
| Clay and iron removal | 1.5 |
| Tape-up and panel prep | 1.5 |
| Single-stage correction | 6.0 |
| Panel wipe and inspection | 1.5 |
| Coating application | 3.0 |
| Cure, second inspection, buff-off | 2.0 |
That's 17.5 hours. Not "a two-day job" — 17.5 hours of a person's time that you cannot sell to anybody else.
Now do the same exercise for a black four-year-old truck with swirls and a bad respray on one door. The correction line goes from 6 to 14 hours and the prep goes up with it. Same coating, same bottle, nearly double the job.
This is the entire reason flat package pricing hurts shops. The variable is the paint, and the paint arrives after you've quoted.
Price the correction separately from the coating
The fix is boring and it works: make correction its own priced line, and quote it after you've seen the car.
Sell the coating at a fixed price — it genuinely is fixed, because the application, the cure and the inspection don't vary much. Then quote correction by stage, with the stage determined at intake under proper lighting.
- Coating application: fixed. Say $600 for a two-year product, $900 for a five-year, whatever your market supports.
- Correction: by stage. One stage, two stage, three stage, each with an hour band and a price.
- Extras: wheels off, engine bay, glass, trim, interior — each its own line.
Now a clean lease return and a neglected daily driver get different totals for the same coating, and neither customer feels tricked, because they were quoted after the car was inspected rather than over the phone.
Work out your real shop rate
You need one number before any of the above means anything: what an hour of your bay is worth.
Take your monthly fixed costs — rent, insurance, utilities, software, loan payments, the phone, the accountant. Say that's $6,400. Add what you need to pay yourself and any salaried staff before profit: say $7,000. That's $13,400 a month you must cover before you've earned a dollar.
Now be honest about billable hours. A single-tech shop open five days a week has maybe 160 available hours a month, of which perhaps 65% are genuinely billable once you account for quoting, phone calls, ordering, cleaning and the customer who turns up forty minutes late. That's about 104 hours.
$13,400 ÷ 104 = $129 an hour just to break even.
Most shops that "feel busy but never have money" are charging $75 an hour without knowing it. Run the arithmetic on your own numbers before you argue with this one.
Now price the job
Back to the sedan: 17.5 hours at $129 is $2,258 at break-even. Add the margin you want — say 30% — and you're at roughly $2,935. Materials on a coating job are genuinely small, maybe $120 including the coating itself, pads, compound and consumables.
So: around $3,000, and you now know exactly why, which means you can hold the price when someone pushes back.
Compare that to a shop quoting "$1,499 full coating package". They aren't cheaper. They're losing $760 per coating and funding it out of the wash business.
The three mistakes that eat the margin
Quoting over the phone. You cannot see the paint over the phone. Quote a coating range on the phone and a fixed number after inspection, and say so plainly: "Coatings run from about $2,200 to $4,500 depending on what the paint needs. I'll give you a firm number in fifteen minutes if you bring it by."
Not charging for the second inspection. Cure time and the follow-up look are real hours. They belong in the 17.5, not in the "we do that for free" pile.
Absorbing scope creep. The customer who asks you to "just do the wheels while it's here" is asking for two more hours. Add the line. It takes ten seconds and it's the difference between a job that made money and one that nearly did.
Track what each coating actually cost you
The reason most shops can't answer "are coatings profitable for us?" is that the labour cost is never recorded against the job. The revenue is in one place, the payroll is in another, and nobody reconciles them per car.
Record two numbers on every service on the job: what the customer paid, and what the technician earned. At the end of the month you can answer the only question that matters — whether the coating work is carrying the shop or being carried by it.
That's exactly why Concorso keeps a payout on every line of a job separately from the price, and why payroll is built from the finished work rather than reconstructed from a timesheet. If you're pricing coatings by feel today, the fastest improvement available to you is simply writing down both numbers for three months.
A quick sanity check
If you take one thing from this: your coating price should be roughly (honest hours × your real shop rate) + materials + margin, and if that number frightens you, the problem is your shop rate or your hours, not the price.
Shops don't go under because they charged too much for a coating. They go under charging too little for the correction underneath it.
Running coating work through spreadsheets and texts? See how Concorso handles multi-day coating jobs — one record from quote to cure, with the labour cost on every stage.