Ceramic coating starts at $800 at our Boca Raton shop. Whether your car lands near that number or well above it comes down to five things, and none of them is the coating itself.
That is the part most pricing pages skip. A bottle of professional-grade ceramic is a small fraction of what you pay. You are buying the hours in front of it — the decontamination, the correction, and the controlled space to cure. Two shops can quote the same coating and be selling completely different jobs.
The five things that set your price
- Size — a Miata and a Cybertruck are not the same panel count, and the difference is hours, not materials
- Paint condition — the single biggest swing, covered below
- How long you want it to last — a 1-year coating and an 8-year coating are different chemistry and different prep standards
- What gets coated — paint only, or paint plus glass, wheel faces, and trim
- Whether it is going over paint protection film — coating over PPF is a different process to coating over bare clear coat
Paint condition is the real variable
Ceramic coating is transparent and it is permanent for its warranty period. It does not hide swirls, etching, or wash marks. It seals in whatever the paint looks like on the day it goes on, and then makes that state very difficult to change for years.
So the honest sequence is: correct first, coat second. If your paint has swirl marks from an automatic wash, that correction work is part of the job, and it is where quotes diverge most sharply. A brand-new delivery with 40 miles on it might need a wash and a light polish. A three-year-old daily that has been through a tunnel wash every week can need multi-stage correction before anything is sealed.
This is why a quote given over the phone without seeing the car is a guess. We look at the paint under proper light before we put a number on it.
The coating ladder
We run three levels of XPEL ceramic, and the difference is durability and what is included:
- XPEL Lite — 1-year coating over paint and glass, with a single-stage paint enhancement. The entry point, and a sensible choice on a lease
- XPEL Fusion Plus — 4-year ceramic over paint and PPF, single-stage paint correction included. The one most customers pick
- Fusion Plus Premium — 8-year protection over paint, glass, and wheel faces, with paint enhancement and a maintenance wash included
Does ceramic coating protect against scratches?
Not in the way most people hope, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. Ceramic is a hard, thin, sacrificial layer measured in microns. It genuinely resists the light marring that comes from washing and drying, and it makes contaminants release instead of bonding. That is real, and it is why coated cars keep looking new.
What it will not do is stop a rock, a key, or a shopping cart. Physical impact is a thickness problem, and ceramic has no thickness to speak of. If your worry is chips on the nose from I-95, that is a paint protection film question, not a coating one.
The two are not competitors. Film takes the impacts, coating takes the chemistry.
Ceramic coating vs wax: the four-year maths
Wax is cheaper per application and more expensive per year. A carnauba wax lasts weeks to a couple of months in Florida heat, so keeping a car waxed properly means several applications a year, every year — either paying for them or spending the Saturdays yourself.
A 4-year ceramic is one appointment. Over the same period, the coating usually costs less in total than staying genuinely on top of wax, and it performs differently while it is on: wax sits on the paint, ceramic bonds to it, which is why the water behaviour and the chemical resistance are not comparable.
The honest exception: if you sell or trade every two years and do not mind the upkeep, wax or a sealant is a perfectly rational choice.
Is it worth it in Florida specifically?
This is the one place the answer changes based on geography. South Florida is unusually hard on paint, and coatings address most of what makes it hard.
UV here is relentless and year-round, and it is what fades and oxidises clear coat over time. Love bug season twice a year leaves acidic residue that etches if it bakes on. Afternoon storms followed by direct sun produce mineral spotting. Coastal air carries salt onto anything parked outside. A coating does not make any of that disappear, but it buys you time to deal with it — contamination sits on top of the coating instead of bonding to the clear coat, so it comes off in a wash rather than needing correction.
That is the practical case. In a dry, mild climate a coating is largely cosmetic. Here it is closer to maintenance.
Why coating over PPF is worth asking about
If you already have paint protection film, or you are considering it, coating over the top is usually the better build. The film handles impact — rock chips, road debris, the damage that costs real money to fix. The coating goes over film and paint alike, so the whole car cleans the same way and the film's own surface gets the hydrophobic behaviour and UV resistance.
Fusion Plus is formulated to go over PPF, which is why it is the tier most of our combined jobs use.
How to read a cheap quote
Coating quotes vary far more than they should, and the gap is almost always in what is left out. Before comparing two numbers, check that they are describing the same job:
- How much correction is included — "one-step" and "multi-stage" are very different amounts of labour
- How long the warranty runs, and what actually voids it
- Whether glass, wheel faces, and trim are in the price or extra
- Where the car cures — a coating that flashes off in an open bay in Florida humidity is not the same install
- Whether the warranty is the installer's or the manufacturer's, and whether it survives you selling the car
What it costs here
Ceramic coating starts at $800 at Auto SuperShield in Boca Raton. Your number depends on the size and condition of the car and which level of the ladder you want, and we will tell you which one we would actually put on it — including when the honest answer is the cheaper tier.
Quotes are free, there is no obligation, and we would rather look at the paint than guess at it.