Insurance for auto service shops, sorted by the work you do

Six kinds of shop, six pages, and one exposure they all share: a customer's vehicle in your hands. Each page below is written for one kind of operation and names the risk that sets it apart. Pick the one that matches your day, and if two of them do, the questions at the bottom sort out which comes first.

Garage liability vs garage keepers

The shop pages

Auto repair shop
Mechanical repair with a premises, lifts, and customer cars on the lot overnight.

Defining exposure: the customer’s car in your bay, with almost none of the coverage legally required.
Auto body shop
Collision and refinish work, often under DRP agreements with carriers.

Defining exposure: a paint booth full of flammables and structural repairs that can fail later.
Mobile mechanic
Repair at the customer’s driveway or lot, out of a van, with no shop address.

Defining exposure: the van and the tools inside it, and a custody question with no bay to hold the car.
Mechanic
The employed tech, the self-employed one-bay operator, or someone deciding which to be.

Defining exposure: the toolbox gap, whose policy covers a tech’s own tools when the shop is not theirs.
Car wash and detailing
Tunnel, automatic, and self-service washes, plus mobile wash and detailing, which share the page.

Defining exposure: a customer claiming the wash or the detail damaged the car, decided by format.
Tire shop
Tire sales and installation, with or without light mechanical work alongside.

Defining exposure: a wheel that comes loose miles after it left your lift, and stacked rubber as fire load.

What every shop on this list has in common

Take away the booth, the van, and the tire racks and the same problem is left standing in every bay: somebody else's car. Liability policies across the industry carry an exclusion for damage to property in the insured's care, custody, or control, and IRMI names garagekeepers as the coverage written to pick up what that exclusion leaves out (IRMI, care, custody, or control). Garagekeepers, in IRMI's definition, answers for damage to a customer's auto left with you for service or repair (IRMI, garagekeepers coverage). Every shop page above assumes you have read that far. The garage keepers page explains how the coverage is built, and the comparison page settles whether your operation needs it, the operations coverage, or both.

The other thing shops share is the absence of a mandate. Unlike dealers, a repair or service business in most states is not told by anyone how much coverage to carry, so the lease, the landlord, and the customer relationship do the telling instead. That is why each shop page spends its words on the exposure rather than on a requirement it cannot cite.

Not a shop, or not only a shop

Coverage
The garage form family, coverage by coverage.
Dealers
The license, the bond, and the requirement-driven half of the trade.
Texas
The one state read to statute so far.

Not sure where you fit at all? The overview lays out the whole site.

Frequently Asked Questions

I run a repair shop and sell a few cars on the side. Which page is mine?

Both halves of the site, and the order matters. Read the auto repair shop page for the work you do every day. Then read the used car dealer page and the dealer hub, because selling vehicles to the public in most states means holding a dealer license, and that license usually carries bond and insurance conditions the repair side never faces. Whether a handful of sales crosses the licensing line is a question for your state motor vehicle agency, and the answer decides whether you are a shop with a sideline or a dealer with a service department.

I am a mobile mechanic but I rent a bay a few days a week. Which page is mine?

Start with the mobile mechanic page, since the van, the traveling tools, and work at the customer’s location are still most of your risk. The rented bay adds the fixed-premises questions from the auto repair shop page: who is liable for what happens inside it, and how a customer’s car left there overnight is covered. Tell the agent about both halves. A policy written for a van-only operation was not told about the bay, and a policy written for the bay was not told about the driveway work.

I detail cars inside someone else’s car wash. Which page is mine?

The car wash page, which covers detailing alongside the wash formats, is the right read. The added question is whose policy answers when a customer says the detail damaged the car: the wash’s, yours, or both. That depends on whether you are an employee, a contractor working under the wash’s coverage, or a separate business renting space, and the arrangement should be in writing before a claim tests it. If you are a separate business, you carry your own liability and your own answer to the custody question, and the wash owner will usually want proof of it.