What a car workshop earns between oil changes

Between oil changes, a car workshop earns from the repairs you didn't plan for, and the richest of those is probably your crumpled door. I say probably because I couldn't find a Malaysian workshop's accounts, or any survey of what they charge. So I've worked this out from an old competition case and some labelled guessing.

Nobody bids for an oil change

The general insurers' association, PIAM, warned in 2025 about tow operators who take crashed cars to "workshops that pay the highest bid".³ Those workshops then have to make the money back, and its chief executive said "costs will be passed down back to you".³

Insurers aren't neutral about where your car ends up, so I'd read that with some care. Still, look at what the warning assumes.

A wrecked car is worth bidding for, at least to some workshops. That tells me more about where the money sits than any price list could, which is handy, because I can't find one.

The one price I can find is old

There's a rate from 2011. A PIAM circular set out terms for workshops on its approved repairers scheme, PARS, after talks with the workshop owners' federation: up to 25% off parts for six car makes, and RM30 an hour for labour.¹

I couldn't find a newer rate, so I don't know what panel jobs pay now. But it's enough to show the shape. Say a door lists at a thousand ringgit and takes five hours, and say a walk-in customer pays sixty ringgit an hour, which is my guess.

One door, two bills, my rough guess

That gap is the worst case, because 25% was a ceiling and RM30 a floor.¹ I'm also assuming the discount comes off the list price, which is how I read it.

What neither of us can see is what the workshop paid for the door. I couldn't find a number for that, and it's the bit that decides whether either bill is any good.

So why would anyone take the second bill? Volume, I'd guess. A panel sends you cars you'd never have found yourself, and one insurer alone took on 195 PARS workshops in a 2020 tender.⁴

The walk-in bill has its own catch, which is that the customer can say no. Someone paying for a dent themselves might decide to live with it, and I'd guess a job an insurer has already agreed to is worth a lot to a workshop in a slow month.

Who had the better of that deal?

Depends who you ask, and for a while the answer was a court case. In 2020 the competition regulator, MyCC, found that the insurers and PIAM had broken the Competition Act by agreeing those terms.¹

The appeal tribunal threw that out in 2022, and it saw the deal the other way round. Workshops could charge more than RM30 and give anything from 1% to 25%, it said, adding that they were "at the upper hand to gain better profit than the insurers".¹

MyCC tried to challenge the tribunal and lost again at the Court of Appeal in August 2026, which held that the Act gave it no such right.² So that's the law settled, as far as I can see.

I'm not arguing with the law. I'd just be slower to call it the upper hand.

On paper a small workshop can ask for more, but it's asking someone with a couple of hundred others on the list. That's my opinion, and one set of panel accounts could change it.

The awkward phone call

A walk-in pays at the counter. A panel job moves more slowly, and this is how one insurer described it in 2022.⁴

One insurer's panel job, roughly

That same insurer said it was adding upfront payments so repairers could stay profitable, while workshops faced dearer labour and parts.⁴ I take that as a sign that cash was the sore point, though the reports I could open don't say how long a workshop waits.

Here's my guess at the phone call. You ring to ask where your car is, and the honest answer is that the workshop is waiting on someone else too.

And the oil change?

It's the bit a workshop can't always get. MyCC's 2021 review said warranties tied to a carmaker's own network may limit competition, and that owners who went elsewhere were sometimes asked to sign a letter accepting that their warranty was void.⁵

So I'd guess an independent workshop mostly meets a car once it's older, when the repairs are coming anyway. I think of the oil change as an introduction. It's small and it's cheap to get right, and it's how you end up being the person someone rings when the gearbox makes a noise.

The other half of that crash bill is the insurer's, which I've looked at separately.