Does anyone know what the going rate is for a bike mechanic’s salary outside of London?

Minimum wage?

£8 – £10 per hour? Will obviously depend on location, skills and demand/supply.

Minimum wage, pretty much AFAIK.

About thirty packets of Jaffa cakes and a packet of Hob Nobs a day..

Evening. Whatever people will work for so you up the salary with no low-ball initially with false promises of phantom increases? 🙂

If it was in a city with a qualified mechanic I’d offer a decent wage not min especially if you expect them to build X number of bikes every day.

A decent mechanic is the backbone and soul of a good shop. Pay them so. Like everyone I’ve experienced bad spannering- you don’t tend to go back.

Would 18k pro rata be on the high side then?

Yep.
If you were very experienced and were managing a large workshop (multiple techs) it would be about right.

£18000/52/40=£8.65 so it’s above the £7.20 living wage. But if you want staff retention, you’ll need to invest in it. Pay peanuts & get a monkey. An experienced, reliable mechanic is a sought after commodity and should be paid accordingly.

Thanks for the input. It’s not easy to find benchmarking info on this.

I think that’s about right for a shop I know in Bristol. Mostly do high end road stuff, but a few basic services and entry level bikes sold as well.

Qualified (Cytech) mechanic here on £7.80/hr. That seems about average.

Thanks for the input. It’s not easy to find benchmarking info on this.

Sod benchmarking.

Offer enough to get and keep the right person.

Minimum wage?

LOL

£18000/52/40=£8.65 so it’s above the £7.20 living wage. But if you want staff retention, you’ll need to invest in it. Pay peanuts & get a monkey. An experienced, reliable mechanic is a sought after commodity and should be paid accordingly.

Couldn’t have put it better myself.

If your view as an employer is that staff are a burden, and you pay them as little as you can and expect the turnover rate to be high (a la MANY MANY shops in and out of the trade), then many get away with paying pretty much minimum wage to their mechanics. However… If like myself you see your staff as an asset, and that the shop is only as good as its weakest link, then investing in your staff both financially and in terms of skills/training is essential, and they will reward you for it in time if not immediately.

I genuinely wouldn’t be where I am right now if I hadn’t hired well 7 months ago, I certainly feel that paying above the going rate (and employing someone who’s mega enthusiastic about his job) has more than paid for itself already.

I don’t know the figures and I’m no business man, but reading the question my gut feel for a good mechanic would be at least £20k a year – irrespctive of location. They need to be able to turn around high quality work quickly as well as do pretty much any and all jobs on bikes – possibly not suspension servicing but everything else should be done.

I’d also ensure training was included but I suspect that wouldn’t be leaving much out of perhaps £27k once all the other beenfits and stuff were taking into account.

Reading the stuff above from people who clearly known more than me – I’m way off the mark, but if the right person turns up, you don’t want them leaving.

“Qualified (Cytech) mechanic here on £7.80/hr”

That’s just wrong. I wonder how much goes through the till/budiness in t/o a week.

Yes I admit there will be low turnover shops.

After I was made redundant, in my wilderness years approx 2011, I was a mechanic in a small Independent for 10 months. I’m a decent enough home mechanic and brought additional capability to the business, but it was a tiny place whose owner had lost interest in it. I’ve just run the calcs and I was earning c16k. It helped to slow the curve of sliding into debt, but it’s but no means a living wage. The place shut this year when the owner retired.

There’s a limit to how much you can earn for the shop.I’d do 20-25k in pure labour and 60-70k in parts a year.The labour covers most of the wages.30-35% (margin) of the parts minus a share of the rent/rates/bills is what the shop makes.Even with a lot of people decrying lbs workshops as overpriced jobs simpletons could do that’s all shops can realistically pay.
I’d say the average is closer to 16.5-16.7k.

I honestly don’t know how people get by on a wage that low

Qualified cytech mechanic on £7.50/hr here, working for a large bike supplier, seems to be the average wage for this kind of job.

I’m Cytech level 3 qualified, 12 years in the trade as a mechanic, 6 of those managing a shop for someone else.
We have an excellent reputation for quality, service forks in house, wheel building, reverb servicing etc. & I’m on just over £8 per hour.
Not the greatest wage, but not bad for what’s often considered a school levers job. (based in the west midlands)

slim…I’ve lived off half that for the last 12 months 😕

That’s disgusting. A bike mechanic has skill and is skilled. A school leaver isn’t skilled. Sorry. I do 95% of my own mechanics and I don’t see it as simple/easy -especially the issues/fixes.

I was chatting to a couple of national chain mechanics and they said nowadays they have to churn out builds non-stop.

I do 95% of my own mechanics and I don’t see it as simple/easy -especially the issues/fixes.

Yeah, but we all know about Hora being mummys special boy…

NB £7.20 is the new minimum wage not the living wage which is north of £8 outside of London.

I honestly don’t know how people get by on a wage that low

Live within your means.
I’d been earning £30k+ for some years when I was made redundant. But because we don’t throw money about on foreign holidays every year or have a new BMW in the drive, it was no issue for me to drop to half that. We don’t save as much as we did, but I don’t pay much tax now either. I’ve worked my way back up a few thousand. It’s under £20k but more than anyone else has quoted above.
But I chose to be a mechanic. I love fixing bikes. And I hope I’m good at it.

I started on £5.50 an hour and ended on £8 after 5 years.
It’s criminal how little the trade pays when people are swanning around on £5k bikes!
Get more tips carrying a plate of food from the kitchen to a table…

Grumble over

We’d all get paid more if everyone on STW stopped buying cheap online

Grumble just starting. 🙂

bikeshops can have a online portal. Before online sales I had to pay full RRP because without the internet how did you know if you were getting a bad deal? Without the internet alot of people couldn’t afford to ride or enjoy their riding much more with better kit than they’d get buying in just one place. Don’t knock the internet. It’s a bad and a brilliant thing for customers and many many bikeshop (owners).

This topic isnt about that old argument..

All I’m saying is that it’s tricky in LBS land right now. I can buy stuff cheaper from the big boys than I can get it at trade.
I’d love to be paid more. My boss would love to make more (or some…) profit right now too.

What needs to happen is what happened in the motorcycle world a few years ago. All the big brands (Honda, Yamaha etc) were suffering through cheap parallel imports from Europe. So they lowered their prices and put the importers out of business. I don’t think there’s any left these days. If Shimano, SRAM etc stopped flooding the OEM market to the point of overstock like they do now, and unified their prices, then small and medium shops would stand a chance of customers returning.

17k for the last job I went for

Yeah I wonder how many of those on this thread saying “that’s an appalling wage” or “I couldn’t live on that” are also those who think CRC is the greatest thing ever and that any LBS charging more than 2p to fix their bike is ripping them off….

The truth is, shops can only afford to pay what they can afford to pay… and wages won’t improve until people are willing to pay fair prices for both service and product.

Realistically there need to be fewer shops and a more level playing field against the big online box-shifters for this to happen.

I hear you but do you begrudge the man or woman on a low or average wage being able to stretch their wage to a half decent bike or parts? Do you think the labour charges are cheap? I’ve been into old school roadie shops and their rates are a fraction of what you get charged in mountain bike orientated shops.

Should mountain biking cut out the man/woman on lower wages? I saw a forum topic somewhere recently where a retired bloke was commenting about the costs of tyres/being able to afford keeping on riding.

Based on those figures it will be interesting to see how the living wage of £9.20 affects the bike world in a few years time.

Should mountain biking cut out the man/woman on lower wages?

Should elephant polo cut out the man/woman on lower wages?

MTBing is a fun sport, but it’s not an essential of life, there’s no obligation on society to make it affordable for anyone. The fact that it is is down to competition, and the way that people will work for low wages in a business they love.

The bike industry is pretty dysfunctional – no-one in it really makes serious money. Lots do okay, but not that many millionaires.

Santa Cruz’s aren’t compulsory.

Remind us again, where is Hora’s bike shop?

🙄

😆

I’m struggling to see any reason to agree with hora’s chat. It is instantly showing why wages are so low…greed. Absolutely nothing wrong with SLX over XT – they both work very well…but the greed and the need for the badge makes XT more desirable. The price point is set at what people are willing to pay…and us mugs seem happy to pay over the odds for stuff (and in the same breath complain about the price charged at the lbs).
A sorry state of affairs.

Bike mechanic?! What’s one of those then? When I snap a spoke I just buy a new bike.