Copart damage types explained: what each label means

Front End, Mechanical, Water/Flood, Burn and the rest: what each Copart damage label means, what it leaves out, and what each damage type goes for.

BUYING · 5 min read

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What the damage line is

Every Copart lot carries a primary damage label and often a secondary one, such as Front End, Rear End, Side, Mechanical, Water/Flood, Burn or Minor Dents/Scratches. It is the first thing most bidders read and the thing they lean on hardest. Copart's own glossary is plain about its limits: damage codes only record damage that is known or has been reported, and Copart does not vouch for their accuracy. Read the label as a starting point for your own inspection, not a survey.

What does Front End or Rear End damage mean at Copart?

Front End, Rear End, Side, Roof and Undercarriage tell you where the car was hit. They say nothing about how hard. A Front End lot can be a cracked bumper and a headlamp, or a car with the engine pushed back into the bulkhead. The severity has to come from the photos, from the write-off category and from whether the car still runs. Two Front End lots at the same bid can be £400 and £4,000 of work apart.

Severity words are what move the budget

Some labels carry the severity in the wording itself. Minor Dents/Scratches and Normal Wear are the light end. All Over means damage on several sides, not one impact. Rollover, Burn and Stripped are the heavy end, where a car can lose most of its panels, its glass or its interior at once. When a label names a severity, it matters more to your repair budget than which corner of the car it names.

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What do Water/Flood, Burn, Rollover and Mechanical mean?

Four labels mean a different kind of repair, not just more of it. Water/Flood means the electrics, the interior and possibly the engine have been wet, and salt water is far worse than fresh, see how to repair flood damage. Burn means heat has reached wiring, seals and plastics beyond what shows in the photos. Rollover means roof, pillars, glass and usually airbags. Mechanical means the fault is in the engine, gearbox or drivetrain, and the label rarely says which. Price each of these as its own job, never as a panel repair.

What the label cannot tell you

The damage line does not tell you whether the structure is damaged. That comes from the insurance write-off category: a Cat N was recorded as non-structural, a Cat S as structural, and a Front End Cat S is a different car from a Front End Cat N. See Cat S vs Cat N. Nor does the label cover what the photos cannot show, see nine kinds of hidden damage auction photos won't show you, or whether the car runs, which is a separate condition label, see what Run and Drive really means.

Which damage type goes cheapest at salvage auction?

We record the highest bid on every UK salvage listing we track as its auction closes, on SalvageMarket rather than Copart, and each lot's damage is sorted into a fixed set of types when it is logged. Across the listings logged by 25 September 2026, the median closing bid was £450 for accident damage (1,569 lots), £650 for a mechanical fault (400 lots), £375 for fire damage (86 lots) and £2,550 for theft recovered (27 lots). Water, vandalism and hail damage have fewer than 20 ended listings each, too few to quote. These are recorded closing bids, not independently confirmed sales, and a national median mixes very different cars. The pattern is still useful: fire damage goes cheapest, and a mechanical fault on its own does not pull the bid below plain accident damage, so the discount has to come from your own maximum bid. The dataset overview keeps the table current.

How the Analyzer reads a damage label

When you paste a Copart link into the Analyzer and it cannot grade the photos, it falls back to the damage label, severity first. A light label (minor, dents, scratches, normal wear) starts at one panel. A bare location with no severity word starts at two panels and a blend. All Over or a heavy label means three panels. Rollover, Burn or Stripped means five panels, with a frame allowance. A roof or rollover label adds glass and airbags, hail adds six panels of paint, and Water/Flood adds a flood allowance, higher for salt water. Airbags are only counted when the lot says they deployed or the side impact is heavy. Structural work comes from the write-off category, never from the location, so a clean-title Front End lot is never charged for a chassis. A Mechanical label means a major mechanical allowance, a confirmed runner gets none, and anything not confirmed as running gets a moderate one.

How to use it

Use the damage line to shortlist, not to price. Filter out the labels that change the job if you are not set up for them, then read the photos panel by panel, check the category and the runner status, and only then set a maximum bid that already includes fees, transport and a buffer. If two lots carry the same label, the photos decide which one is cheaper to fix.

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