ARE YOU PAYING TOO MUCH FOR SERVICING?

There are ways to keep car servicing costs down, without cutting corners that can cost you more in the long run. We explain how

- Claire Evans

WE'RE ALL LOOKING for ways to save money, and one in 10 people in the UK has reduced how often they service their car, in a bid to cut costs. According to research by the RAC, 14% of people are also putting off car repairs, and it's a bigger concern among younger motorists, with 37% of 17 to 24-year-olds postponing remedial work to save money.

While taking your car for an MOT test each year is a legal requirement once it reaches three years old, regular servicing is not. However, scrimping on regular maintenance could be costly in the long run. That's because trips to the workshop are likely to expose minor faults long before they develop into more major defects that could cause a breakdown or lead to major expense. For example, if you let your car's brake pads wear beyond the recommended limits, not only will your car's braking performance be worse, but it's also likely to cause the brake discs to wear prematurely and need costly replacement.

One way to save money and not cut back on servicing is to find a cheaper garage, and a simple way to compare costs is to find out the hourly labour rates they charge. This is a good indicator of which garage will be the most affordable, because each one should use broadly similar labour timings when working out maintenance costs for a specific car.

To find out how much you can save by shopping around for servicing, we asked 279 car maintenance businesses around the UK to tell us their hourly labour rate. All the companies approached are members of the Independent Garages Association and are listed on the Trust My Garage website.

To find out how much regional variation there is in labour rates, we looked at prices by postcode, obtaining at least three prices for each of 105 different areas.

Not all postcodes had three Trust My Garage workshops; in these instances we've grouped two or three nearby postcode areas together so the sample size is still a minimum of three.