The honest answer depends entirely on which kind of shop you walk into. A body shop has to sand, fill, prime, repaint and cure your panels. Paintless dent repair skips all of it, so your car goes home in 5-7 days with the paint it was born with.
426 Miami St, Leavenworth, KS 66048 · (913) 907-5180
Your adjuster hands you a list of shops. The one at the top is usually a body shop, and a body shop fixes hail the old way: sand the panel, fill it, prime it, repaint it. Your factory paint comes off and a new coat goes on.
Paintless dent repair never touches your paint. A tech works behind the panel and pushes each dent back to flat from the inside. Same metal. Same paint that left the factory. No filler, no sanding, no color match.
One shop repaints your car. The other un-dents it.
Every step in a repaint is a queue. The panel waits for the booth. The booth waits for the color. The color waits to cure. Then it is blocked, polished and reassembled. None of that is the shop being slow; it is what repainting a car actually takes.
CARSTAR quotes the job publicly at “anywhere between 2 days and a whole month.” That is their number, not ours.
Paintless repair has no booth, no cure, no reassembly. The metal is worked and the car is done.
Hail repair is priced and scheduled by dent count per panel, not by the size of the car. A hood with forty small dents and a hood with a hundred and forty are different jobs on the same piece of metal, and the only way to know which you have is to read the panel under a reflection board and count.
Roughly, the things that stretch a hail job:
A single Kansas City hailstorm can damage thousands of vehicles in fifteen minutes. Every PDR bay in the metro fills from the same afternoon, which is why the honest answer to "how long" changes depending on when you ask.
Bring the car in the week of the storm and you are near the front. Wait a month and you are behind everyone who did not. That is the single biggest thing under your control, and it is worth more than any scheduling promise a shop can make.
You get a finish date in writing before any work starts, and a free loaner so you are not fighting your insurer over a rental.
Every dent is documented first by the Argus 3D scan, in one pass, so nothing gets left off the claim and there is no supplement argument in the middle of the week.
Paintless repair is slow work done in fewer calendar days, not fast work done sloppy. Metal moved back to its own shape stays there because nothing was added to hold it. There is no filler to shrink and no clearcoat to fail. That is why every panel carries a lifetime warranty. A repaint cannot be warrantied the same way.
Sharp creases, cracked paint and damage on a panel edge sometimes need conventional work. Your scan tells you which panels are which before you commit, and you will hear “this one needs paint” if that is the answer.
No. Get the scan first. Then you know the real number and can decide whether filing is worth it.
Yes. Mobile estimates across the Kansas City metro. The repair happens at the shop in Leavenworth.
Free scan, free estimate, and a finish date in writing.
Or call (913) 907-5180 and talk to a dent tech, not a call center.