What do you charge to remove a scratch in a windshield?

Question:

What do you charge to remove a small scratch in a windshield?

Answer:

We recommend charging your customers by the hour. Set your labor rate and tell customers you will estimate your time. It is impossible to tell them for sure how long it will take. You can also charge by the inch of the crack you are attempting to repair. If you do that, test polish a 1” section for free in the worst section of the scratch. How long it takes to remove the scratch in that 1” section will help you determine how long it will take to polish out the entire scratch. Multiply the number of inches by the time it took to polish the 1” section, and multiply the total by your hourly rate. 24″ x 2 minutes = 48 minutes. If your shop rate is $60/hr or $1/m, you would estimate $48 for the job. In our experience, a typical wiper burn (light scratch) that is 1/8″ wide and 24″ long, you should allow about 60 minutes buffing time to complete. That does not include time and materials to mask off the car to protect it from splattering compound. With that in mind, we might estimate 80 minutes for the entire job if our shop rate was $60/hr. Considering you can make $100/hr or more repairing windshields, we would not recommend charging anything less than $50/hr for buffing a scratch which is far more labor-intensive, but what a technician charges is up to the individual.