What car repairs actually cost.
Typical parts-and-labor ranges for the most common repairs, in plain English — so you can sanity-check a quote before you approve it. For a number tuned to your exact year, make, model, and symptom, the free AI Mechanic estimates it in seconds.
Cooling
Charging & electrical
Fuel system
How to read these ranges
Every figure here is a band, not a price, and the band is wide on purpose. The same repair on a compact sedan and a full-size truck are different jobs with different parts, and the shop rate in a rural county is not the shop rate in a major metro. A range tells you whether the quote in your hand is roughly normal or obviously off — which is the question most people actually need answered.
Each page splits the job into parts and labor, because which side dominates tells you where you have leverage. When the part is most of the bill, shopping the part matters and the OEM-versus-aftermarket decision is the big lever. When labor is most of the bill, you are paying for access — how buried the component is — and the lever is bundling nearby work into the same teardown rather than paying for that teardown twice.
Diagnose before you price
The most expensive mistake on this page is pricing the wrong repair. A code that looks like a catalytic converter is often an oxygen sensor. A charging fault blamed on the alternator is often the battery. Noise blamed on a wheel bearing is often a tire. Start from the trouble code or the symptom, confirm the cause, and then price it — that order routinely finds a cheaper fix than the worst-case repair the symptom first suggested.
Ranges are typical all-in US independent-shop figures for a mainstream vehicle, and are a starting point, not a quote. Prices move with vehicle class, parts tier, and local labor rates.