Box Truck Corner Cap Repair Cost: Parts, Labour and Installed Prices

A box truck corner cap costs $26 to $285 as a part, and that is the only part of this question anyone publishes. Rear caps are cheap at $26 to $71. Front caps run $43 to $165, and Morgan or Supreme OEM caps with the logo and marker light reach $120 to $150. Installed at an independent shop with no other damage, expect roughly $125 to $525. The figure that should worry you is the other one: once the top rail, corner post or roof edge went with it, documented bills run $1,200 to $2,934.

The part is documented. The job is not.

No OEM, body shop or trade body publishes a standard installed price for corner cap replacement. Morgan’s online parts store has a corner caps category that search engines are blocked from reading. Wabash and Supreme have no public consumer parts store. The industry flat-rate labour guide that would answer this, the National Trailer Dealers Association Service Department Labor Hours Guide, is members-only at $49 for members and $149 for everyone else, and it is not confirmed that corner caps are even among its itemised operations.

A long-established Michigan truck body shop lists corner cap repair as a standard service line and publishes no prices at all, stating that estimates require visual inspection. That is the norm in this trade.

So the part prices below are real, read off supplier listings. The installed figures are calculated from those parts plus verified 2026 shop labour rates, and they are labelled as calculations.

Rear corner cap prices

Front corner cap prices

The pattern is consistent and useful: rear caps cluster at $26 to $71, front caps at $43 to $165. The front cap costs more because on most modern bodies it is a large moulded piece wrapping both the corner radius and the roof radius, and it often carries a marker light.

Across 428 eBay listings for box truck corner caps, most single caps sit between about $57 and $120, with the full range running $56.25 to $235 for kits.

Kits are usually the better buy

Ten dollars for the rivets, adhesive and caulk is the easiest money in this job. Those are not optional consumables, they are what makes the repair watertight, and sourcing the correct polyurethane sealant separately costs more than $10.

Fibreglass caps exist but have no published price

Fibreglass corner caps are real. The Fleet Parts catalogue lists a dedicated fibreglass caps section with Supreme and Utilimaster part numbers. The catalogue carries no prices, and no supplier anywhere publishes a priced fibreglass cap listing.

Watch for a trap here. Several listings say “for FRP body”. That describes the body the cap bolts to, not the cap’s own material. Those are cast aluminium caps for fibreglass-bodied trucks, not fibreglass caps.

Labour

These disagree because they measure different trades. Automotive collision body labour averages $86 an hour nationally. Heavy-duty truck service runs a $149 median, up from $135 the prior year. A corner cap job sits in the truck body and trailer repair trade, so $95 to $150 an hour is the defensible 2026 working range.

No published flat-rate labour time for corner cap replacement could be found. One real itemised estimate for a plastic driver-side cap shows a labour quantity of 9 on the top rail line, not the cap. A trade source puts a simple corner swap at one to three days of calendar time including parts lead time, which is not the same as billed hours.

Beware of a specific scam here: several unrelated domains serve an identical file called “Trailer Repair Flat Rate Guide.pdf” at the same path. That is a PDF spam network, not a real guide.

Installed cost

Real-world reports line up with the calculations. Owners report paying about $400, and under $500, for cap replacement. A practitioner who bids this work put a cap plus adjacent damage at $1,200 to $1,800 and up.

The single most useful case on record

A rental moving truck clipped a metal post at about three miles an hour and damaged a plastic driver-side corner cap. The initial itemised estimate was $2,933.93, covering the cap, light rewiring, a light assembly, driver-side top rail removal and replacement, two ten-foot pieces of J-moulding, roof sealer, rivets, monobolts and caulking.

The final bill was about $750, after the company reassessed and concluded the damage was limited to the cap.

That collapse from $2,934 to $750 is the whole lesson. Roughly three quarters of a corner cap estimate can be adjacent panels that may or may not actually be damaged. Get the estimate itemised, and ask them to show you the damage on each line.

What inflates the bill

Inspect these before accepting any estimate: roof bows and front header, the roof skin edge which may need re-flanging, the drip rail, marker and clearance lights and their wiring, the side wall and interior front wall panels, the aero fairing at the cab-to-box transition, and box squareness measured on the diagonals.

Every figure there is part only. No installed price is published for any of them. Note how fast this escalates: a $40 rear cap sitting next to a $241 corner post and a $1,050 door.

Can you do it yourself?

On a bolt-on cap with no structural damage, yes. Once the corner post, top rail or roof skin is involved, no.

The Utilimaster service guide specifies what the job actually needs: a POP riveter or Monobolter, blind rivets, a number 11 drill bit rather than 3/16 inch and an F bit rather than 1/4 inch for clearance, a drill stop, one-compound polyurethane sealant applied between 40 and 100 degrees Fahrenheit, double-faced adhesive tape, and medium-grade blue thread lock.

Hand riveters start at $5 and go to $25. The catch is that most body caps use 1/4 inch blind rivets, which a hand riveter will not reliably set. The OEM guide specifies a Monobolter or Huck gun with a 1/4 inch nose assembly, which pushes a serious DIY toward a $40 to $150 air or hydraulic riveter plus a compressor.

One instruction from that guide matters more than any price here: do not replace buck rivets with POP rivets. If the damaged area is held by solid buck rivets, substituting pop rivets compromises the body structure. That is not a corner to cut.

The economics are good. A DIY swap saves $95 to $600 in labour on a part costing $26 to $165. One eBay seller shows 276 units sold of a Morgan driver-side cap and 193 of the passenger side with light, which tells you how large the self-install market is.

Should you claim it on insurance?

Usually no, and the arithmetic is straightforward.

Physical damage deductibles of $1,000 are typical for owner-operators, with options up to $10,000 on top-end rigs. A cap-only repair lands at $125 to $1,000 installed, with real reports of $400, under $500 and $750. That is at or below a typical deductible, so there is nothing to recover.

Worse, filing costs you something. Insurers treat all paid claims as an accident, even with no police report, pull five years of motor vehicle and CLUE loss history, and price off it. The higher the amount paid, the higher the risk rating. Not-at-fault status is not full protection.

The calculation flips once the top rail, corner post or door frame is involved and the bill reaches $1,200 to $2,900. Then the claim clears a $1,000 deductible, though by a margin you still have to weigh against five years of rated premium. Deductible buyback coverage exists and is generally cheap if this is a recurring risk for you.

Where this sits on the scale

A cap-only repair is roughly 0.5 to 6 percent of a new 16 foot body, and under 1.2 percent of a complete new truck. Even the worst documented case at $2,933.93 is under 18 percent of a new body. It is the cheapest significant body repair on the truck, and it is only expensive when it is not actually just the cap.

For scale on the rest of the body, a dealer estimates roof fibreglass cracks at $200 to $500, extensive leak repair at $500 to $1,000, minor structural work at $500 to $1,500 and major structural work at $2,000 to $5,000.

Getting a fair quote

• Get the estimate itemised by line. The $2,934 to $750 case is what happens when somebody checks.
• Ask them to show you the damage on each line. Specifically the top rail and the J-moulding, which is where the money hides.
• Ask for the part number they are ordering. Aftermarket caps without the logo run $82 against $118 for OEM with it. On a work truck nobody is inspecting, that is a free $36.
• Price the cap yourself first. You now know rear is $26 to $71 and front is $43 to $165. A shop quoting $300 for the part is marking it up heavily.
• Buy the kit with rivets and sealer if you are doing it yourself, and confirm whether your body uses buck rivets before you start.
• Check the box diagonals before you pay. If the box is out of square, the cap is the symptom and not the problem.

Part prices were read off published supplier listings on 9 November 2026. Installed figures marked as calculated are derived from those parts plus verified shop labour rates, not quoted by any shop. Get your own written estimate.

Related cost guides

• Heavy equipment cost guide: all 18 machine classes

Sources checked November 2026: eBay corner cap listings, eBay Morgan and Supreme OEM corner caps, Wheeler Fleet Solutions, Supreme 116405 and Morgan Truck Body dealer specifications noting clearance lights installed in the front corner caps.