Survey reveals that what technicians raised, repeatedly, was not a demand for more money. It was a list of questions nobody at their shop would answer.
Manchester, N.H.—An analysis of 1,000 technician interviews conducted over the past year finds that most automotive employers and collision shops need to approach technician turnover differently: transparency, not compensation, is the number one reason techs leave.
The survey, 2026 Technician Retention Report, conducted across 48 states by Trinity Talent Group, reveals that what technicians raised, repeatedly, was not a demand for more money. It was a list of questions nobody at their shop would answer:
• How are flag hours are actually calculated?
• What is the logic behind their pay rate is?
• What does it takes to advance?
• Is the work is distributed fairly?
• Where do the shop’s profits go when raises do not materialize?
“Pay is a painkiller, not a cure,” Trinity Talent Group Chair Jason Duffy said. “Every shop owner’s first instinct when a tech gets restless is to throw money at him. That buys you a few months and it fixes nothing, because the problem was never the number on the check.
“It was that nobody ever explained the number on the check. Silence doesn’t read as neutral to a technician. It reads as something being hidden.”
Cost of turnover
The report also quantifies what that turnover costs, and the figure is substantially higher than most operators assume. Trinity’s analysis puts the revenue lost to a single empty bay at $24,775 per week, or $107,276 per month, reaching $1,288,300 over a year for a solid producer.
Standard flag-hour calculations, the report found, understate the true cost of a vacancy by roughly 75 percent, because they omit parts markup, calibrations, and sublet work. Trinity’s average repair order value across the dataset was $4,955.
Against that number, the report’s recommendations require no increase in labor spend. They include posting flagged hours daily where the floor can see them, explaining the labor-time methodology rather than asserting it, publishing a complete pay scale with the advancement criteria attached, making dispatch decisions defensible, holding monthly one-on-one production conversations, and telling the team where profit is being reinvested.
The report concludes that a shop implementing these practices over 30 days can hold its technicians without changing a single pay rate.
Attract New Tech Talent
Duffy argues the findings have a second use that most employers miss entirely. Once a shop knows what technicians actually want, it can market for it.
“Knowing what talent wants means you can market for it, and almost nobody does,” Duffy said. “Every shop in America runs the same job post. Competitive pay, great team, apply today. That tells a technician nothing, which is exactly why it doesn’t work.”
The report outlines where that marketing happens. Job boards remain the baseline, but the report’s position is that the job description itself is the variable almost no employer treats as one: a post that names the pay scale, explains how flag hours are calculated, and states the advancement path is answering the questions technicians brought to all 1,000 interviews, before they ever have to ask.
Social media, the report finds, is the most effective channel available, and the one most underused in the trades. A shop that shows its bays, its people, and how it actually operates is doing in public what the report recommends doing internally.
Community events put the same message in front of technicians who are not actively looking but would move for the right environment. And trade schools, Duffy argues, are the most overlooked opportunity of all.
“Trade schools produce entry-level technicians, not profit-creating technicians,” he said. “Those have to be headhunted. But the schools are still where you go to tell students what you’re about and how it differs from where most places are failing them.
“Walk in and explain that your pay scale is published and your dispatch is transparent, and you’ve separated yourself from every other shop that will recruit that class.”
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