Scratch & Respray
A stone chip on the bonnet. A key line down the door. A bumper that has quietly faded a shade lighter than the panel beside it. Sooner or later most drivers land on the same question: is this a touch-up job, or does the car need a proper respray?
The honest answer is that a full car respray is overkill for most of the paint damage we see. A lot of it is repairable at panel level or smaller, for a fraction of the cost and time. But there is a real line between damage a touch-up will genuinely fix and damage where a touch-up only hides the problem for a few months before it comes back worse.
This guide explains where that line sits, what each option involves, and how to work out which one your car needs before you spend anything.
A car respray means stripping a panel (or the whole vehicle) back to a sound surface, preparing it, and rebuilding the paint in layers the way the factory did: primer, base coat for the colour, then clear coat for gloss and UV protection. The panel is masked, sprayed in a controlled booth, baked to cure, then cut and polished to match the finish of the panels around it.
Respray is a scale, not a single job, and most work sits at the lower end of it:
The important part is that a respray restores the paint system itself, sealing the repair against moisture and UV the way the original finish was.
A touch-up fills a small area of damage with colour, usually from a pen, bottle applicator or aerosol matched to your paint code. There is no booth, no baking and, in most consumer-grade kits, no proper clear coat layer over the top.
Touch-up is a sealing job more than a cosmetic one. Its real value is stopping a chip that has gone through to primer or bare metal from turning into a rust bloom. Viewed from a couple of metres away in flat light, a careful touch-up on a small chip is close to invisible. Viewed up close in sunlight, you will usually still see it: a slightly raised blob of colour sitting proud of the surrounding surface, with a texture and gloss level that does not quite match.
Stick with a touch-up when all of the following are true:
Run a fingernail across the damage. If it does not catch, you are in the clear coat and a polish or touch-up will likely handle it. If it catches, the damage has gone into the colour layer or deeper, and colour alone will not restore the surface.
A respray is the right call when the paint system itself has been compromised rather than just marked.
Peeling, cloudy or chalky paint (most often on roofs, bonnets and boot lids) is clear coat breakdown, and it cannot be polished or touched up back into shape. Once the clear layer goes, the colour underneath is exposed and starts oxidising. As RACV notes on protecting car paintwork, Australia’s sunlight, heat and dust are hard on a finish, and horizontal panels take the worst of it. Refinishing is the only genuine fix.
Bumper corner scuffs, shopping trolley lines and long key scratches are all area damage. Dotting colour along a 30cm scratch produces a visible seam. Refinishing the panel produces a repair you cannot find.
Grey or white in the base of a scratch means you are looking at primer. Bare metal is a corrosion clock that has already started. Both need proper preparation, sealing and a rebuilt paint system.
Paint repair and panel repair are separate problems. If the surface is deformed as well as marked, the metalwork has to be corrected first. Where the paint is unbroken, paintless dent removal can often reshape the panel without any refinishing at all, which is faster and keeps your original factory paint intact.
This is the part that separates a repair you notice from one you do not, and it is where most cheap respray work falls down.
Your car has a paint code, usually on the compliance plate under the bonnet or on the driver’s door jamb. Most people assume that code is the whole answer. It is not. A single code can have several factory variants, because batches differ between plants and production runs, and your car has since spent years in the Australian sun. The panel in front of the technician is no longer the colour that left the factory, so spraying the “correct” code straight from the tin can leave one panel looking visibly newer than the ones beside it.
The fix is to measure rather than assume. A spectrophotometer reads the actual colour of your panel, capturing it from multiple angles so metallic flake and pearl effects are accounted for, then matches that reading against the manufacturer’s formula variants to find the closest one to your car as it is now.
At AMA Collision that reading is only the starting point. Every colour is sprayed onto a test card and checked against the vehicle in natural light before anything touches the car. Where a panel meets a large flat surface, the colour is blended into the adjoining panels rather than stopped at the join, so the eye never gets a hard edge to catch on. Our paint refinishing service uses manufacturer-approved primers, base coats and clear coats as a matched system, applied in down-draft booths and baked to cure. Mixing products across systems is one of the most common causes of premature paint failure.
The work is carried out by I-CAR trained technicians to OEM-aligned procedures, and it is backed by a lifetime workmanship warranty on the repairs we perform. That guarantee is the practical difference between a respray and a paint job: we are underwriting the match and the adhesion for as long as you own the car.
One modern complication is worth knowing about. If your bumper carries parking sensors, radar or a camera, refinishing it is not purely cosmetic: paint thickness and the way the bumper is refitted can affect how those systems read the road. The vehicle may need ADAS calibration afterwards to confirm they still work as designed.
Cost tracks the scale of the work, not a flat rate. Based on 2025 Australian pricing data, a full respray typically runs from around $1,800 to $12,000, with a median near $6,500. Colour changes and extensive preparation work generally start around $5,000, and larger or luxury vehicles sit at the top of the range or above it.
Single-panel and localised work is a different conversation, and it is where most drivers actually land. Three things move the number:
A touch-up kit, by comparison, costs $20 to $60. If the damage genuinely suits one, that is the smarter spend and we will tell you so.
Allow one to three days for a single panel, covering preparation, spraying, curing and polishing. Multi-panel work runs three to five days, and a full respray commonly takes two to three weeks because every panel is prepared, sprayed and cured in sequence. Anyone quoting a same-day full respray is skipping preparation.
It should be indistinguishable when done properly. That means measuring your panel’s current colour rather than relying on the paint code alone, spraying a test card to confirm the match, and blending into adjoining panels where the finish calls for it. If a shop offers to match your paint from the code without looking at the car, treat that as a warning sign.
A high-quality respray usually helps, because tidy paint suggests a well-maintained car. A poor one hurts, and it is easy to spot: overspray on rubbers and trims, orange peel texture, or a panel sitting a shade off its neighbours. Buyers of enthusiast and collectible vehicles often prefer original paint, so on those cars it is worth weighing up first.
Comprehensive policies generally cover refinishing when it forms part of repairing accident or storm damage. General wear such as sun-faded paint, clear coat failure or stone chips accumulated over years counts as maintenance rather than damage, and is not usually covered. If the damage came from a specific incident, check your policy before paying out of pocket.
Yes, and for most damage that is exactly what we recommend. Panel-level refinishing is the standard approach for localised damage. Full resprays are reserved for restorations, colour changes, or paint that has failed right across the vehicle.
Touch-up is a maintenance product. It seals small chips, stops rust getting a foothold and buys you time. Use it on chips smaller than a five cent piece, where the paint around them is still sound and a close-up imperfection will not bother you.
A car respray is a repair. It rebuilds the paint system, restores the clear coat and returns the panel to a finish that matches everything around it. Use it when a scratch catches your fingernail, when the clear coat has begun to peel or cloud, when the damage covers an area rather than a point, or when you are preparing the car for sale.
If you are not sure which side of that line your damage falls on, you do not need to guess. Send us a few photos through our online assessment and one of our estimators will tell you honestly whether it is a touch-up job or a refinish, or find your nearest team on our locations page and drop in for a look. If a touch-up will do the job, that is what we will say.