Automotive Technician Salary in Texas 2026,
$48,310 Median | BLS Data by City

The published Texas figure is $48,310 a year, or $23.23 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with a band from $29,360 at the 10th percentile to $81,720 at the 90th and quartiles at $36,650 and $62,270. That is 4.6% below the national median of $50,620 in gross terms, with no Texas income tax applying. The row is SOC 49-3023, an exact match to the occupation.

Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands at $50,940, then Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos $50,610, Midland $49,990, Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington $49,720 and College Station-Bryan $49,080. The spread is under four percent and every one is above the state median of $48,310. Vehicle repair demand follows the vehicle population rather than industry, so it is unusually evenly distributed, and the state figure reflects rural and small-town Texas as well as the metros.

No. Texas issues no licence or registration for vehicle repair. The regulated activity is inspection — certified inspectors and inspection stations are licensed through the state's inspection programme — and outside that anyone may perform repairs. The credential the industry actually uses is the ASE certification series, a private national programme that dealerships and independent shops treat as the standard measure of competence and frequently tie to pay grade.

For non-commercial vehicles, yes. Texas ended the mandatory annual safety inspection for those vehicles and replaced it with an inspection programme replacement fee collected at registration. Emissions testing continues in specified counties and commercial vehicle inspection is unchanged. The practical effect on shops is the loss of a steady, low-value but high-frequency source of customer contact, and the market consequences will take a few data cycles to appear in wage figures.

It is the single most useful thing a Texas technician can do for their earnings, precisely because the state provides no licensing signal. ASE certifications are frequently tied directly to pay grade at dealerships and larger independents, and master certification is a common threshold for the specialist and diagnostic work that sits between the $48,310 median and the $62,270 seventy-fifth percentile. Manufacturer-specific training programmes work the same way and often pay better still.

Flat-rate pay. Technicians in most dealerships and many independent shops are paid by the published book time for each job rather than by hours actually worked, so a fast, well-equipped technician working a good job mix earns dramatically more than a slower one in the same building on the same nominal rate. Add that job mix itself is allocated by the shop — diagnostic and warranty work versus routine maintenance — and the variation compounds. That is how a single occupation produces $29,360 at the 10th percentile and $81,720 at the 90th. It also means that when evaluating a shop, the effective hourly rate and the job mix matter more than the posted flat rate.

Less than it might appear for wages, more than it appears for shop economics. Safety inspections were low-margin work, but they brought vehicles and owners through the door on a predictable annual cycle, and a proportion of those visits converted into repair work identified during the inspection. Removing that for non-commercial vehicles takes away a customer acquisition channel, particularly for independent shops that relied on it. Emissions testing continues in specified counties, so the effect is uneven across the state. It is too recent to appear in the May 2025 wage data on this page, and it is worth revisiting when subsequent cycles publish.

Toward a split. Electric vehicles need less routine mechanical maintenance — no oil changes, far less brake wear because of regenerative braking, fewer wearing parts — which erodes the volume of work at the bottom of the band. At the same time they require high-voltage safety competence, battery and thermal management diagnosis, and software work that a conventional technician does not have. Advanced driver assistance systems add calibration work to ordinary collision and suspension repairs. The technicians who acquire those competences are moving toward the $62,270 and $81,720 upper percentiles; those who do not are competing for a shrinking pool of routine jobs. In a state with 69,750 technicians, that transition is a large-scale sorting.