How We Get the Numbers

Wages come from the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey, and the state adjustment comes from BEA Regional Price Parities. Shop labor rates and parts prices have no government source, so they are market estimates, and each page labels them that way.

Where the numbers come from

These are the sources cited across the 123 live calculators, grouped by publisher. Each calculator lists its own sources at the bottom of the page.

How a repair estimate is built

How we use NHTSA owner complaints

Every repair page with enough data carries an owner-data report built from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's public complaint files (model years 2015–2025). A complaint counts toward a part when the owner's own description names that part. From those complaints we compute the models and model years named most, the odometer reading at the time of the complaint, the dollar amounts owners wrote next to the part, how often other parts are named in the same complaint (shown only when a part appears at least five times more often than in complaints overall), the speed at failure and whether the car was towed. Quotes are owners' own words from the public record, shown in sentence case.

These are unverified owner reports, not a random sample: owners mostly write in after a serious or expensive failure, and the counts are not adjusted for how many of each car were sold. We use them to show what real owners ran into, never to rank a car's reliability.

How we use CFPB complaints and EPA fuel data

Car-finance calculators carry data from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's public Consumer Complaint Database (product "Vehicle loan or lease"). Each page uses only its own slice, for example payoff and title problems on the loan payoff page, lease-end fees on the lease page, so no two pages repeat the same numbers. We show how many complaints there are, what they were about, which lenders were named most, how companies responded and the trend by year. Complaints are not a random sample and are not adjusted for a lender's size, so a count is never a verdict on a lender.

Fuel, EV and ownership calculators carry the U.S. EPA and Department of Energy's fueleconomy.gov ratings for every current model: annual fuel cost, highway fuel use, EV energy use and range, and EPA's five-year fuel savings or extra spend versus the average new vehicle. These use EPA's test ratings, 15,000 miles a year and EPA's fuel price assumption; the calculator on each page uses your own numbers.

How these pages are written

The calculators and every data table and chart are generated by code from the sources above. The written sections that explain the data are drafted with AI assistance (Anthropic's Claude) from this data only; an automated check removes any sentence containing a number that is not in the data or the calculator's own output, and a second automated review checks each page for contradictions and unsupported claims before it is published. Michael Woo is responsible for the site and its corrections.

What we don't do

• We don't take payment from shops, parts sellers or warranty companies, and ads never change a number.
• We don't present a market estimate as a government figure. Anything without a government source is labeled "market estimate".
• We don't treat raw NHTSA complaint counts as reliability rankings; they aren't adjusted for how many of each car were sold.

Spot something wrong?

If a source link is stale or a price looks off, send us a correction. We check every report against the source and correct the page when the source confirms a different figure.