HOW MUCH DOES SCRATCH REPAIR COST?
It depends almost entirely on depth, and your fingernail is the first diagnostic: drag it across the scratch — if it doesn’t catch, you’re likely in the clear coat, and polishing may erase it for the cost of a detail. If it catches, paint is cut: at our published rates, a spot repair runs $200–$500, a full panel refinish $500–$1,000, bumper scuffs and scratches $300–$800, and when a metallic or pearl color forces blending into neighboring panels, multi-panel work runs $1,200–$2,500. One depth matters more than money: a scratch down to bare metal starts rusting in weeks, not months — that one shouldn’t wait, whatever you decide about the cosmetics.
The Longer Answer
THE DEPTH LADDER — AND WHAT EACH RUNG COSTS
Automotive paint is a sandwich — clear coat over color over primer over metal (or plastic) — and a scratch costs whatever it costs to rebuild the layers it cut. Rung one: clear coat only. The scratch looks white-ish, your fingernail glides over it, and it often disappears under machine polishing because no color was lost — the cheapest fix in bodywork, and sometimes free advice at the estimate counter: “that’ll buff.” Rung two: through the clear into color. Now refinish work exists — a contained spot repair at $200–$500 when the scratch sits away from panel edges, or a full panel at $500–$1,000 when it sprawls. Rung three: through primer, to metal or plastic. The repair itself prices the same way — panel refinish — but the clock starts mattering, because bare steel rusts fast in Texas humidity, and rust converts a paint job into a metal repair.
Two multipliers decide which rung your estimate lands on. Location: bumper covers are their own lane — scuffs and scratches there run $300–$800 at our published rate, partly because plastic prep differs from metal. Color: solid white hides a repair edge; metallics and pearls don’t, so an honest shop blends the new color partway into the adjacent panels — that’s the $1,200–$2,500 multi-panel blend row, and it’s the difference between paint that disappears and paint that reads two-tone in sunlight. A word on the drugstore fixes: touch-up pens are legitimate rust protection for rung-three chips and scratches — dab, seal the metal, done — but they’re not a cosmetic repair, and the “scratch remover” compounds only work on rung one, because that’s all polishing can ever reach.
The money math, honestly: a single keyed line or parking-lot scratch usually lands near or below a typical deductible, which makes it cash-versus-claim arithmetic — and when it was vandalism, comprehensive covers keyed cars with the deductible applied, so the written number decides whether filing makes sense. Either way the number comes free: the estimate takes minutes, the fingernail test is honest, and if the verdict is “that’ll buff,” we’ll say so rather than paint a panel that didn’t need it.
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