What is collusion?

Two shops can land on the same number and both be completely in the clear — as long as each one got there on its own. What turns a labor rate into a federal antitrust problem isn't the number itself. It's whether competitors agreed on it.

Know your costs, know your market, set your rate — that's just running a shop. Pick up the phone and settle on a number with the shop across town — that's price-fixing, and the law doesn't care how friendly the call felt.

You're free to figure out what your labor is worth and charge accordingly. That includes:

• Calculating your rate from your own shop's costs — rent, tools, calibration equipment, training, insurance, and the margin you need to stay open.
• Looking at public benchmark data — published wage surveys, government labor statistics, trade-publication rate reports — to sanity-check where you land.
• Setting a rate that happens to match a competitor's, so long as you got there independently.
• Negotiating your rate directly with insurers or customers, on your own account.

The FTC's own guidance draws this exact line. As the FTC's Guide to Antitrust Laws puts it: the key word is agree. Independent decisions that happen to look alike aren't a violation — an agreement is.

Price-fixing among competitors is per se illegal — meaning courts don't weigh whether the agreed rate was fair, or whether it actually raised prices. The agreement itself is the violation, full stop.

That agreement doesn't need a signature or a contract to count. It can be:

• A phone call or text thread where two shops settle on a shared number.
• A group chat where everyone quietly falls in line behind one shop's rate.
• A handshake understanding at a trade event that nobody undercuts the others.

Courts take this seriously in the collision-repair industry specifically. In 2017, the Eleventh Circuit reversed a dismissal in In re Auto Body Shop Antitrust Litigation, MDL 2557, letting body shops' labor-rate coordination claims move forward — a signal that rate-coordination claims in this exact industry are taken seriously, not waved off as too speculative to litigate.

Do:

• Build your rate from your own costs and the margin you need.
• Check public, published data to see where your rate sits in the market.
• Negotiate your own rate with your own insurers and customers.

Don't:

• Call, text, or meet with a competing shop to agree on what you'll each charge.
• Signal a rate to a competitor and expect them to match it, or match theirs in return.
• Use any tool, group chat, or association to coordinate rates with other shops — even informally.

• Federal Trade Commission, Guide to Antitrust Laws
• In re Auto Body Shop Antitrust Litigation, MDL 2557 (11th Cir. 2017)

This page explains general antitrust principles as they apply to labor rates in collision repair. It isn't legal advice, and it doesn't cover every fact pattern. If you have questions about your specific situation, talk to a lawyer.