What Actually Drives the Price of a Ceramic Coating

The first question almost everybody asks is what a ceramic coating costs. It is a fair question and it deserves a straight answer, so here is the straight answer: nobody can tell you accurately until they have looked at your paint.

That sounds like a dodge. It is not. By the end of this you will understand exactly what we are looking at when we quote, and you will be able to tell a real quote from a number somebody made up to get you on the phone.

Most of the cost is not the coating

This is the part that surprises people. The bottle of coating is a small fraction of what you pay. The work is almost entirely preparation.

A ceramic coating is a semi permanent layer that bonds to your clearcoat. Whatever is on the paint when it goes on is sealed underneath it, and it stays there. Swirl marks, embedded contamination, water spot etching, all of it gets locked in and then covered in something designed to be hard to remove. A coating does not hide defects. It magnifies them, because the gloss it adds makes everything underneath it easier to see.

So before any coating is applied, the paint has to be genuinely clean and genuinely corrected. That means a decontamination wash, chemical removal of iron fallout, a clay treatment for anything bonded to the surface, and then however much machine polishing the paint actually needs. After that the whole car is wiped down with a panel prep solution so there is nothing left on the surface for the coating to bond through.

The coating itself goes on in about an hour. The preparation is the day.

What we are actually assessing

The condition of the paint

This is the single biggest variable, and it is why the same model of car can be a very different job depending on who owned it. A two year old vehicle that has been hand washed carefully might need one light polishing stage. The same car after three years of automatic car washes and dry wiping can need two or three stages to get the swirl marks out, and that is most of a second day.

We can usually tell a great deal in the first few minutes under a light. What we cannot tell from a photograph is how the paint responds to a polish, which is why we do a test section before committing to an approach.

The size and shape of the vehicle

Surface area matters, obviously. A compact car and a three row SUV are not the same amount of panel. But shape matters as much as size. Vehicles with a lot of complex curves, sharp body lines, tight panel gaps and plastic trim take considerably longer to work around than a slab sided truck with large flat panels, even when the total area is similar.

The colour

Black and other dark solid colours show every defect, which means correction has to be taken further before the finish looks right. Silver and light metallics hide a great deal. This is not about doing a lesser job on a light car. It is that a dark car is only finished when it looks perfect under a light, and getting there takes longer.

Which coating, and how long you want it to last

There are genuine differences between coating products and the durability tiers they are rated for. A longer rated coating costs more as a product and usually demands a higher standard of preparation underneath it, because committing to several years of protection over paint that was never properly corrected wastes everybody's time.

What else is being coated

Glass, wheel faces and barrels, trim and plastics can all be coated. Each adds labour. Wheels in particular are often best done off the vehicle, which adds time but makes a visible difference to the part of the car that collects the most contamination.

Why a cheap coating is usually expensive

If a price sits far below everything else you have been quoted, something has been removed from the job. In practice it is almost always the preparation, because that is where the hours are.

What you get is a coating applied over paint that still has swirl marks in it. It will look glossy for a few weeks, because any coating adds gloss. Then you start noticing the defects are still there, and now they sit underneath a layer specifically engineered to resist removal. Correcting it properly afterwards means polishing the coating off first. You end up paying for the preparation you skipped, plus the removal of the coating you already bought.

What is not in our price

We are mobile, so there is no travel charge inside our service area and no drop off. We come to your driveway with our own power and water and work there. You do not lose a day to a shop visit and you are not helping to pay for somebody else's retail unit.

The one thing to plan for is time. A coating needs the vehicle to stay put while it cures, and it should not be rained on or washed for a period afterwards. We tell you exactly how long when we book, because it affects when you can use the car.

When we tell people not to do it

A coating is not right for every vehicle, and we would rather say so before you spend the money.

• Paint that is already failing. If the clearcoat is peeling or heavily oxidised through, a coating will not save it. There is nothing sound left to bond to.
• A car you are selling next month. You will not recover the cost. A good detail and a sealant presents nearly as well for a fraction of it.
• A lease coming to an end soon. Same reasoning. Protect it, do not coat it.
• A vehicle that lives under sprinklers. A coating helps, but if the car is hit every day, moving where it parks will do more for the paint than anything we can apply to it.

How to get a real number

Tell us the make, model, colour and roughly how old it is, how it has been washed, and what you are hoping for. Photographs in daylight help, particularly of any area you are unhappy with. We will come back with a range and tell you what would move it to one end or the other.

If what your car actually needs is paint correction rather than a coating, or a thorough detail rather than either, we will say so. We would rather do the right job once than sell you the biggest one.