What mechanics get paid in Australia

The award floor

Most Australian repair workshops are covered by the Vehicle Repair, Services and Retail Award 2020 (MA000089). If you are a qualified technician in a workshop with no enterprise agreement, this is the number your pay legally cannot go below.

On top of the base rate, the award adds allowances and penalties that regularly make up real money in a workshop: an allowance for tradespeople required to supply their own hand tools, a first aid allowance, leading hand allowances that step up with the number of people you supervise, a meal allowance when you are held back on overtime, and penalty rates for overtime, weekends and public holidays. Every one of those figures is revised each year, so we have linked the current Fair Work Ombudsman pay guide rather than reprinting numbers that go stale.

Apprentice rates are a set of percentages of that tradesperson rate, from 50 per cent in year one to 88 per cent in year four. The full table is on our apprenticeships guide.

What the market actually pays

Jobs and Skills Australia puts median full time earnings for motor mechanics at $1,405 a week, and median hourly earnings at $35. Against the level 1 award floor of $1,119.10, the median full time technician earns roughly a quarter more than the legal minimum.

That gap is the honest headline of this page. The award tells you what a workshop must pay. The median tells you what the middle of the market does pay. If you are sitting on the award rate with a trade certificate and a few years behind you, you are at the bottom of a distribution, not in the middle of it.

What moves your number

We are not going to publish a salary calculator with invented precision for diesel, auto electrical or EV work, because we cannot source those splits to a figure we would defend. What we can tell you is what actually shifts pay in this trade, which is what to raise in a conversation with an employer:

• Classification level. The award has more than one tradesperson level, and the step between level 1 and level 2 is worth over $100 a week. Ask which level you are being paid at and what it takes to move up.
• Tickets beyond the trade certificate. A refrigerant handling licence for air conditioning work, high voltage and EV training, diagnostics, LPG, heavy vehicle or plant qualifications all widen the range of work you can be charged out for.
• Authority to sign off. Being an authorised inspector or licensed vehicle tester in your state makes you harder to replace.
• Supervision and leading hand duties, which the award pays for explicitly.
• Overtime and callout patterns, which vary enormously between a fleet workshop, a dealership and an independent, and can matter more to a take home figure than the base rate.
• Where you are. Metro, regional and remote workshops do not compete in the same labour market, and neither do dealerships and independents in the same suburb.

Pay in job ads, and what the law says

There is no general requirement in Australia to put a pay rate or a pay range in a job advertisement. The relevant provision, section 536AA of the Fair Work Act, works the other way round: it prohibits advertising a rate of pay that would breach the Act or a fair work instrument such as an award or enterprise agreement. In the Fair Work Ombudsman's words, job ads cannot include pay rates that breach the Fair Work Act or a fair work instrument. Ads for piece rate work carry an extra obligation to specify the periodic rate or state that one applies.

So when an automotive ad says competitive salary and nothing else, that is a choice, not compliance. It is a choice that costs everybody time: technicians waste applications on jobs that pay under what they earn now, and workshops waste interviews on candidates who were never going to accept. MotorPath asks workshops to publish a pay range because the trade moves faster when both sides can see the number, not because a law requires it.

The context behind the numbers

Jobs and Skills Australia counts 109,200 people employed as motor mechanics, with annual employment growth of 700 and a median age of 36. Industry body AAAA estimates the national shortfall at roughly 40,000 technicians, and VACC research in 2024 found automotive vacancies drew about 4.5 applicants each against roughly 22.6 across the workforce.

Those two facts sit oddly together: a large, slowly growing trade that still cannot fill seats. For a technician deciding whether to ask for more, the scarcity is the argument. For a workshop, the same scarcity is why the award floor is rarely the number that keeps people.