Just wondering like.

Here in Vancouver, and seemingly most of Canada, it’s an absolute pittance for what is asked for in return. Seems to be CAD$14-17 per hour is common. That’s about 8 to 10 quid.

The US seems to be better – I constantly see jobs paying 20-25$ph (15-19 GBP)

I didn’t really work as a mechanic in the UK, but don’t remember it being too bad?

Minimum wage!

I was on minimum too

it’s an absolute pittance for what is asked for in return

Is it?

Just out of curiosity I googled it and to get from zero to Cytec level 3 takes 20 days.

Now while I appreciate you have to deal with the great unwashed public, that’s neither a particularly onerous qualification or a high barrier to entry.

How long do KwickFit train their fitters for before letting them loose on a car? Or a 4 year nursing degree, apprenticeship in a trade etc.

Is it?

Just out of curiosity I googled it and to get from zero to Cytec level 3 takes 20 days.

Now while I appreciate you have to deal with the great unwashed public, that’s neither a particularly onerous qualification or a high barrier to entry.

How long do KwickFit train their fitters for before letting them loose on a car? Or a 4 year nursing degree, apprenticeship in a trade etc.

A paper qualification does not make a good bike mechanic. The course is also very hard to fail 😜

A well rounded mechanic who can work on and fix anything really takes a good few years to hone his skills. It’s definitely an everyday is a school day job.

It’s an underpaid job for good mechanics unfortunately. Shame you can on average get more for putting things on shelves in a supermarket.

How long do KwickFit train their fitters for before letting them loose on a car?

Is that a trick question? 😀

I was on rock bottom minimum wage when I first moved to Sheffield. It was bloody hard and work and flat out busy at all times plus say goodbye to your weekends.

Never did a cytech qualification but there’s not much I can’t do and almost nothing I didn’t fix. There’s plenty of people with cytech qualifications that struggle to build a brand new bike from a box and have to be constantly double checked. The real challenge is making rusty old donkeys safe to ride for people who don’t want to spend any money.

My only bonus was the occasional packet of biscuits.

My boss was gutted when I handed in my notice but they’d have to double the wages for me to consider doing it forever.

Cytech 1-3 might only take 20 days but it’d cost about 3.5k!

It’s not like working on a bike is difficult is it.

The real challenge is making rusty old donkeys safe to ride for people who don’t want to spend any money.

This bit is surprisingly difficult.

It’s not like working on a bike is difficult is it.

Working on new or very well maintained high end kit is easy and a pleasure. When you only see one bike like that in every hundred, or it’s yet more brake and gear cables and trying to get things to work again, or if you’re lucky an almost dead BSO with two new inner tubes, then that’s where you start earning your pittance of pay.

And a pack of biscuits if you’re lucky.

I’m run my own shop and I am it’s only employee. I know my wage for the hours I have to put in is not even minimum wage. This industry operates on low overal margins so pay in the u.k is never high.

I think the issue is that compared to, say, a car (even a cheap car) a bike is essentially a cheap, small, simple bit of kit that you can maintain at home with a minimum of tools, fuss and difficulty if you have a modicum of common sense and ability.

Yeah, with the right kit you can change a car tyre in the same time as a bike tyre, but how much does that kit cost to buy? Sure, a proper Park Tools head tube reamer/facer and headset installation tools are going to be spend, but if your bike’s a £50 hack you’re not going to care about that when you can use a 2×4 and a mallet.

No disrespect to properly decent bike mechanics, but working on bikes is infinitely easier for the average person to do than fixing something like their car themselves. And when it’s perceived as being simple, they won’t pay much for it.

I’m not in Vancouver but I’m not far up the road and I earn a good chunk more than the quoted amounts, plus extended medical etc. If you think you are worth more than $17ph, find the decent shops that pay it and show them your worth.

There’s so much different between the bike mechanic industry and car mechanic industry that it’s almost not worth comparing. They have guide prices (that are set high because people don’t want to work on their cars so pretty well have to pay), and if the mech beats the guide time then he/she tends to pocket the extra money. A good chunk of car mechanics ultimately is removing a product and bolting on a new one, the issue being one has to unbolt 15 other products in order to gain access! Who wants to faff around doing that? It’s not hard, but boring and tedious to most people. It’s the nature of bikes and accessibility to parts to be removed, serviced or adjusted that means that trying to work on your own bike is an attractive proposition.

The complicated bits like suspension is typically not done by the LBS.
So anything else such as setting up gears, changing bearings or bottom brackets is very low skilled at best.

Looks like it’s agreed then. If you spend 40 hours a week setting up gears and fixing punctures you deserve to live in poverty.

The complicated bits like suspension is typically not done by the LBS.
Depends on the size of the LBS. My LBS has a big workshop with at least 6 mechanics working at one time and quite a few of them are certified Rock Shox mechanics. Increasingly they have to be good with electronics too because of the number of ebikes they repair and high end electronic gear systems.

Over on Facebook there is a World Bicycle Mechanic Forum group. Join that and you’ll regularly see folk discussing pay rates, as well as it being an excellent source of info.

It’s not like working on a bike is difficult is it.

May be not, but working on a bike efficiently is definitely a skill, and its the number of bikes you can fix correctly, first time, in a given amount of time that will justify your pay grade (or lack of it).

For me, there’s very little I can’t do on a bike at home, but when I do need something doing, its strange, frame-destroying if it goes wrong, or needs highly specific tools for a one off, so I’m very glad that its exactly this kind of thing that my LBS (18Bikes) specialise in. Their hourly rate is not so different to an indy car garage, which seems absolutely fair as its as much as a specialism and an investment in equipment (and I want them to be there when I need them), but equally, I wouldn’t want to be paying that to get a puncture fixed or have my indexing tweaked 2 clicks, which is why I do it myself.

Since when has something being difficult equated to pay levels?

Since when has something being difficult equated to pay levels?

That’s a good point. I’m now sitting in a office with nice clean hands, smart clothes and a comfy seat. I’m home by 5 every day and I’ll never work a weekend again.

It’s the easiest job I’ve ever had and pays significantly more than I was earning for fixing bikes. Still nothing to shout about though, but I’ve never been more relaxed or pampered in my entire working life. The bloke sitting next to me does essentially the same job for almost twice the money and he spends most of his day on YouTube.

When you look at how much cyclists moan about the cost of everything it’s no surprise cycle mechs are on minimum wage.

I was on slightly more than minimum wage as a “proper bike mechanic” at Halfords and about half minimum wage at LBS. As others have said it’s not a particular skilled job. So minimum wage is about right. The higher money comes from selling bikes or more specifically bike accessories. But again if you want a well paid job bike shop is not it. If you enjoy it though then that’s a different matter.
I was taught by the LBS. I’ve met cytech trained mechanics and never been impressed. Training should be via an apprenticeship rather than being rinsed for a piece of paper.

I think some of the comments show a wide range of thought to what a bike mechanic actually is these days. TBH, I don’t think your average Halfords mechanic will be figuring out how to measure the spokes and build a wheel with a Campagnolo Nucleon rear hub (2x straight pull spokes with half moon spoke adapters that fall out of the hub when lacing on one side, and radial J bend spokes on the other…) with no instructions on one job, then stripping down a $13K E-MTB to figure out an electrical issue on the next. Not all shops and mechanics are created equally and mechs tend to get paid accordingly.
For good or bad, how much revenue you can generate is the main factor for what income you can obtain (kind of obvious really unfortunately). Hence, confident sales reps who just speak a load of shite with authority can rake in the cash. And why nurses and the like get paid eff all for their skills.

It feels like it should be more valued than it is as an occupation. I guess the consequences of ballsing something up can be quite significant. I don’t think fixing bikes is any easier than a lot of skilled technician jobs that would pay better.

But

It seems to suffer from the same thing whereby the UK public get the tradesmen / bike mechanics / childcare / nursing home care they deserve because they think they can do it themselves* thereby the work has a low value to them.

*often slowly and / or badly

BMw charged me £160 an hour to diagnose a problem. That’s after a back street garage had already told me what the problem was, but couldn’t fix it in time ( i had broken down in Inverness and live in Nottingham so was super keen to get it fixed quickly 😀 ).

I don’t have access to the software to diagnose the car, I doubted I had the right tools to do the job…

And that is why the bmw garage can afford 3 receptionists, why they can afford to poach mechanics from Honda by paying top money.

seems to suffer from the same thing whereby the UK public get the tradesmen / bike mechanics / childcare / nursing home care they deserve because they think they can do it themselves*

Comparing a person who can index gears, grease a bearing … Or if they are at the pinnacle of their profession – be able to build a bicycle wheel😂
Comparing them to someone employed to do a job who looks after the most vulnerable in society hardly rings true.

Let’s not pretend fixing a bike is anything other than very simple. And whilst I accept ebikes complicate things … Your typical LBS mechanic will not be the fella actually fixing the issue; he will only check battery is charged,that there is no obvious sign of damage .. send it off to the experts under warranty.

It feels like it should be more valued than it is as an occupation.

100%

It’s not like working on a bike is difficult is it.

Let’s not pretend fixing a bike is anything other than very simple.

imo consistently sending bikes out that are safe and well serviced isn’t as simple as some think it is, before we get into work rates and organisation. Or not fking up the expensive tapping tools too often, or causing damage that needs fixing at a loss.. Some of us might see bike spannering as simple but bikes get used on public roads with all the risks that go with that. The wage to liability to a business ratio is often out of line for bike mechanics and what they can add to customer service in a shop is really undervalued.
Personally I think a mechanic should be worth a good average wage (~£25k ish) and would handle the responsibility and work rate/organisation that goes with it. Really good ones would get more? But I don’t know tbh. Add in good customer skills and you should be on decent money as an asset to a business. The difficult bit is for a shop to be making enough to support that sort of wage full time. Or, what demand there is at a fair level of service cost to support employing those skills.

For good or bad, how much revenue you can generate is the main factor for what income you can obtain (kind of obvious really unfortunately).

So true, though if you think of a mechanic as revenue defence (like not getting sued or ruining a shop reputation) they gain value on top of the mark up generated by the workshop?

£19 an hour is bloody good money.

4 year degree, one year post grad, 12 months in office training, 10 years post qualification experience and I was earning £13.33 per hour based on the 75 hour week I was working.

I’ve no recent experience of shop wages but in Melbourne, Australia in 2006 I was earning AU $15/hr during the week and $18/hr on the weekends. I’m pretty sure that was increased to 18/21 in the last few months. That equated to more than £8/hr, at the time which didn’t seem too bad to me at the time considering I could only earn £10/hr in the U.K (well, in rural Gloucestershire anyway, would have been more in the cities) in my skilled trade as a toolmaker/CNC machinist with a 3 year apprenticeship and a further 6 years experience behind me.

One thing care has in common with bike mechanics is that people can’t see the value in either.

Care goes to the lowest bidder and onwards to minimum wage earners

Bike shops can’t afford decent mechanics because people as above think it’s just about indexing gears and greasing bearings.

It proves the point above about Britishness getting in the way .

In truth what you spend alot of time doing in a bike shop is undoing people who thought it was easy’s **** ups

Fwiw when I left the trade 10+ years ago I wasn’t on minimum wage….. How ever when I moved to that job j brought 10 years of experience doing everything in the shop from.mechanics to stock forecasting.

No disrespect to properly decent bike mechanics, but working on bikes is infinitely easier for the average person to do than fixing something like their car themselves.

I remember when I could fix a few things on my car myself (not necessarily well either – back to that liability point). Now engine management and covered parts make it all a garage’s job. Look at the rise of electronics on bikes and you can see where top-end tech bikes are headed. Electronic gears and drive, complex suspension – I don’t see much difference in complexity or the expectations of skill and earning power of the mechanics.

£19 an hour is bloody good money.

It is, hard to see a bike shop supporting that but with £3-10k bikes and all the complexity of them, if you had a big enough catchment area and a great head mechanic, a team leader and coach for the jnr guys, someone with good people + PR skills etc, 40k’s not unrealistic. Maybe not the right area/market for more than a handful of shops in the UK to get to that level though, even if riders would pay for the value of the work.
OP,

Here in Vancouver, and seemingly most of Canada, it’s an absolute pittance for what is asked for in return.

Is that a supply/demand thing, or is it easy to find work as a bike mechanic?

Bike fixing should be more highly valued, as should most minimum wage jobs . Definitely should be on average wage IMO.

However, fixing bikes isn’t that hard compared to fixing cars. I mean, fitting say new driveshafts isn’t any more difficult than a bike job, but diagnosing a complex electrical fault in a car is a much greater undertaking than any bike job.

Bikes are becoming more difficult to work on with the increase in electronic gearing and ebikes, but these things are not really getting fixed in the conventional sense; the units are just replaced as a whole.
Riding a bike is merely a hobby for over 95% of people, something they do in their spare time, so comparing a bike mechanic (misleading job title for just a bike shop assistant) to a vitally important role in society such as a care worker is absolutely ridiculous.
Bike mechanics are typically youngsters doing it as a Saturday job, or some old duffer doing it for beer money or because they not qualified to get anything better.

The electrical fault issue is a good point. If your car has one, the garage (in my experience) will charge you for diagnosing the issue based on the time it took to find the problem. Bike shops have a really hard time doing that. Creak finding on a full suspension bike being a good example. The mech could spend two hours faffing about stripping things down, only to find it was a loose derailleur hanger. I bet most shops write that diagnostic time off (we don’t….) and charge the fee to fix the issue only. Hence the shop doesn’t make money and the mechanic gets paid minimum wage.
A good mechanic will minimize the diagnostic time by being methodical, have techniques beyond just pushing down on the pedals to try and source the location of the creak, and check the least time consuming variables first, which is an argument for going to a shop that charges more and has good mechanics.

Jameso, Vancouver has a lot of bike commuting traffic, and many (but not all) just treat a bike as a form of transport and don’t want too spend much money, especially with bike theft being rife.
The bike shops themselves have been terrible at raising prices.
There is also a very transient population. Plenty of people there on a work permit and enough skills to be the sort of mechanic that some people above think that all shops have.
Cycling is very seasonal. Most people forget that they have a bike from December to March. So it’s easy to hire a Brit / Aussie on a low wage and fire them in October when business dies down.
It’s not all like that though. An example below charges through the roof for service work, so one would assume that the mechanics are paid better:

https://bicicletta.cc/pages/bespoke-bike-repair-service

Mooman, the workshop manager comes from an engineering background, and I’ve come from the realm of ‘proper’ jobs, but I decided to live in one of the worlds epicenters of mountain biking and make a living from it, rather doing some generic office job in Milton Keynes and trying to cheer up their miserable lives by trolling on STW 😀

Fwiw I’m a degree qualified mechanical engineer and was for a few year before I left bike trade.

I have no issue rebuilding a car from the chassis up Inc engine and rewiring -my current car I’ve done from chassis s up and Im 5 years in with the only advisory on mot being a Dom indicator bulb
……

I have built a number of e bikes from the ground up and fault found several more

I left the bike trade due to a lack of money – absolutely nothing more

More what is needed from.mechanics today is business acumen tha mechanical skill

Fwiw …..the art of motor cycle maintainance covers it.

Fixing something is not about what it is.

Its about understanding what it’s supposed to do .

Why it doesnt do what it’s supposed to do

What needs to happen to make it do what it’s supposed to do.

I use that theory to work on bikes/boilers/campervans /cars/ mygainful employment

And further more.

I did a business plan for a local bike shop.

Fwiw you would have to be radio rental to finance the risk

High Potential to earn sub Mon/wage for many hours.

Might as well flip burgers in Macdonald’s at those stakes.

I get the feeling those that follow I through do so due to lack of understanding of the industry hence the low survival rate

It’s not like working on a bike is difficult is it.

The number of stripped rotor bolts and knackered Maxle collars (two of the simplest of simple tasks on the face of it) you see working in a bike workshop would suggest otherwise..

Knowledge is nothing without the ability to apply it (as suggested by trail_rat above) – being able to work on your own fleet of bikes (which for most people is a fairly narrow part of the spectrum) doesn’t prepare you to work on a 1920s road bike or a £50 BSO with crappy v-brakes made of cheese which you still need to get the ‘best’ from.