What used-car repairs actually cost in Ireland

Labour, not parts.

A front wheel bearing is a €12–€25 part. Fitted, it's €100–€200. A track rod end is €35–€45; the job with alignment afterwards runs €120–€250. When a quote looks high, the question to ask is how many hours are in it, not what the parts cost.

This is also why the same repair at a franchise dealer can be double. Neither is a rip-off exactly — dealers carry costs independents don't — but for an out-of-warranty car that's eight years old, you're usually paying for a level of process the car no longer needs.

Brakes — the single most common paid-for job after an NCT.

Parts alone are modest: front discs €70–€90 a pair, front pads €30–€35. If a quote is far above the top of these ranges, ask for the parts and labour split.

Tyres. Priced per tyre, fitted and balanced. Size drives the cost more than anything else, which is worth knowing before you buy a car on big wheels.

Fitting, balancing, valve and disposal add €10–€20 per tyre. Four-wheel alignment is €40–€70 on top, and it's worth doing whenever tyres or steering parts are replaced — otherwise the new tyres wear unevenly and you pay twice.

The legal minimum tread is 1.6mm. Braking distance in the wet increases by 30–50% between 3mm and 1.6mm, so a car that's legal is not necessarily a car you want to drive through a Donegal winter. A tyre over six years old gets a Pass Advisory at the NCT even if the tread is fine.

Steering and suspension — the category that fails most often on older cars.

These jobs cluster. Once one front suspension joint is worn the others usually are too, and a garage doing the wishbone will quote the ball joint at the same time because the labour overlaps. That's not upselling — it's cheaper than two visits.

Routine items.

The timing belt is the one to ask about. It's not an NCT item and it gives no warning, but on most engines it destroys the engine when it goes. If the seller can't show it's been done within the manufacturer's interval, assume you're paying for it, and factor the full amount into your offer.

Corrosion.

Everything else on this page is a repair. Structural rust is usually a verdict.

The reason is arithmetic, not engineering. As one Irish owner put it on a 2001 Focus quoted €450 for rear sill work: "€450 would go half way to buying a replacement with an NCT." Welding is labour-intensive, it can't be done cheaply and properly at the same time, and finding rust in one place nearly always means there is more of it somewhere you haven't looked yet.

This is the thing our cost estimates understate, and we'd rather say so. Our per-model repair figures are built from the NCT failure categories, and bodywork carries no price in the source catalogue. On average, 20% of failures for a given model have no price attached, and for the worst-rated models it's around 30%. So where a model's weakness is the bodyshell rather than the mechanicals, the real gap between a good car and a bad one is wider than our numbers show — not narrower.

Check the sills, the wheel arches, the boot floor under the mat and the suspension mounting points before you check anything else. It is the cheapest ten minutes in car buying.

Four questions, in order:

1. What's the parts and labour split? Parts you can price yourself in two minutes. Labour hours are where quotes diverge.
2. What's failed, and what's merely worn? A garage listing eight items has usually mixed "this failed the test" with "this will need doing eventually." Ask which is which, and get the failures done first.
3. Is this a symptom or a cause? New tyres on a car with a worn suspension joint will be scrubbed out inside a year. Alignment after suspension work is not an optional extra.
4. What's the car actually worth? A €600 repair on a €2,500 car is a different decision from the same repair on a €9,000 one. Nobody at the garage will do this sum for you.

Spending on the car you already own because you've already spent on it.

A car that needs €1,200 of work is not worth €1,200 more than it was — it is worth whatever it is worth, minus the work. Past spending is gone either way. The only question that matters is whether the next €1,200 buys more remaining life than €1,200 towards something else would. On a fifteen-year-old car with rust, it almost never does.

Insurance, which depends on you rather than the car. Depreciation, which for a car this age is usually small. And anything genuinely catastrophic — a gearbox, a DPF, a hybrid battery — which is rare enough that averaging it into a figure would mislead more than it helps.