Gift box
GSM Performance Customer Car Colouring Book Edition 1Once someone has settled on a cage, the next question is nearly always the same one. What is it going to cost to have it fitted? We supply roll cages for well over a thousand applications and we do not fit them, so there is no fitting bill of ours to defend on this page.
What follows is the homework instead. We went through the price lists UK cage fitters publish, years of owner reports on the forums covering what people actually paid, and the fitting instructions the cage manufacturers issue to installers, and pulled it into the numbers you should expect to hear when you ring around.
The short version: the type of cage sets the bill long before you pick a shop. A bolt-in half cage is an afternoon of work. A full weld-in with the dash out and door bars tight to the shell is a week or more of skilled labour, and the quote reflects that.
What is on this page
Ring three fitters about the same cage in the same car and you can hear three numbers that barely seem related. It puts people off getting the job done, and it should not, because the spread almost always comes down to three things that are in your control to pin down before anyone quotes.
Fitters price around a stripped car. Custom Cages asks for a bare rolling shell for weld-in work and bills £40 an hour for anything they have to remove themselves.
Mounting plates, gussets, paint and refitting the interior are separate line items in one quote and bundled into the next. Two quotes rarely cover the same list of jobs.
Corrosion near a mounting point has to be put right before a cage can go onto it, and nobody finds it until the carpets are out.
The table is the whole guide in one place. It assumes you are supplying the cage and delivering the car with the interior already out, which is how most fitters want the job to arrive. The sections after it show where each number comes from.
| Cage type | Typical labour hours | Typical fitting cost |
|---|---|---|
| Rear bolt-in half cage, clubsport style | 3 to 6 hours | £200 to £500 |
| Full multipoint bolt-in cage | 6 to 10 hours | £300 to £600 |
| Bolt-in cage with welded feet | 9 to 16 hours | £450 to £900 |
| Full weld-in kit cage, shell already stripped | 10 to 20 hours | £800 to £1,700 |
| Full weld-in with the shop stripping and refitting | 30 to 40 hours | £1,700 to £2,500 all in |
| Fully custom fabricated cage | 40 to 70 hours | £2,500 to £3,500 and up |
Those ranges are drawn from published fitter price lists and dozens of owner-reported quotes going back to 2008, with the older figures adjusted up to current money. They are a sanity check for the quotes you get, and no substitute for a written one on your own car.
Cage fitting is not exotic labour. The rates sit in the same band as a decent independent garage, and the size of the bill comes from the hours, not the rate. From the fitters that publish figures and the rates independent fabricators quote:
The maths follows directly. A 10 hour kit weld-in at £60 to £70 an hour lands at £600 to £700, and a 35 hour full install at the same rate is £2,100 to £2,450. The owner-reported quotes through the rest of this page sit almost exactly on those lines, which is a good sign nobody is making the numbers up.
The proper competition install. The cage is trial-fitted to the shell, tacked, then fully welded with 360 degree welds on every joint and stitch-welded to plates on the body. It is the strongest way to put a cage in a car, it is the version FIA-regulated events require, and it is where quotes vary the most, because the job runs from welding a pre-bent kit into a shell somebody else prepared right up to building a bespoke cage around the car from straight tube.
Costing a cage build end to end is a regular part of my job on the counter here, I am Cameron by the way, and the weld-in is where estimates go wrong most often. So here is what people have actually paid.
On time, one installer reported about 10 hours for a kit cage in a stripped car including all the cutting, welding and finishing, and an experienced race car builder put a full install at 30 to 40 hours from someone who knows what they are doing. A line from an American fabricators’ forum explains the gap between those numbers: of 25 hours spent on a cage, maybe 3 are spent bending tube. The rest is fitting, prep and welding in awkward positions.
Whatever the billed hours, most shops want the car for a while. Two weeks in the workshop is the figure fitters publish, and the quickest professional turnarounds we found were still measured in days.
Nearly all the weld-in cages we sell are pre-bent kits developed for one exact shell, like the E36 kit here. The tubes arrive profiled and part-shaped, so the fitter’s time goes into fitting and welding instead of fabrication, and that is exactly why a kit lands at 10 to 20 hours of labour where a scratch-built cage runs 40 or more.
It is also why the kit route is the one I point most people at. The £600 to £1,200 a typical weld-in kit costs to buy is bought back in fabrication hours you never pay for, and the design is already proven against the shell, so there is no head-scratching on your invoice either.
Here is the bit of the rulebook that surprises people. Under Motorsport UK’s fixing requirements, each foot of a bolt-in cage sits on a steel reinforcement plate of at least 3 mm thickness and 120 cm² area attached to the shell, with a minimum of three M8 bolts of 8.8 grade per foot. In practice, the clean way to meet that is to weld the spreader plates to the shell and bolt the cage to them. So a compliant bolt-in install usually involves a welder anyway, and you get most of the strength of a weld-in mounting with a cage that can still come out of the car.
Plenty of the bolt-in kits we sell ship with the mounting plates in the box, so the welding is a few hours for a fabricator and the cage bolts down once the plates are on. What that stage costs on its own, from the reports we collected: £150 from a retired welder on an E36 Compact with the owner helping, £420 to £480 per car from independent motorsport welders, and £800 to £900 quoted by one shop on an already stripped E46.
All in, labour for this style on a stripped car clusters between £400 and £900. For current supply-and-fit context, GDF Steelworks lists a bespoke rear half bolt-in cage with welded spreader plates from £1,650, and SW Motorsports builds full bolt-in Motorsport UK cages with laser-cut weld-in foot plates, fitted at its own workshop.
The friendliest budget of the three, and the version plenty of owners fit themselves. A pure bolt-in cage bolts through the floor with plates sandwiching the panel, no welder involved, and a rear half cage, the classic clubsport setup of main hoop and backstays, is the quickest of the lot because it leaves the front of the cabin alone.
The owner reports are consistent. A half cage that picks up existing mounting points went into a Clio 182 in about an hour and a half including the strip-out. With drilling for spreader plates, a half cage is a half-day job at home. A full multipoint bolt-in with the interior out is a comfortable weekend for a first-timer, or 6 to 10 hours for a shop, which at UK rates is £300 to £600 of labour. On the US Porsche forums, where bolt-in roll bars are the same job, the settled shop figure is 3 to 6 hours for a rear bar.
Half cage kits start at just over £300 including VAT, so a clubsport setup fitted at home is comfortably the cheapest way into a caged car. These are the kind of thing:
Move up to a full multipoint bolt-in and the same weekend of your own time, or a day of a shop’s, covers cages like these:
One thing to check before you order any of them: no welding does not always mean no cutting. Some applications need carpet and interior plastics trimmed around the bars, and a few need small sections of body metal cut for the brackets. The product listing notes carry the car-specific details, and the brand lineup guides cover whole ranges make by make.
Reading the fitting instructions Safety Devices issues with its weld-in cages, alongside the workshop requirements Custom Cages publishes its fitting terms, explains most of the price gap between bolt-in and weld-in. A weld-in is fabrication work on the shell of the car, and the manufacturer-specified sequence runs to more stages than most people expect.
It also shows exactly where your own labour saves money. Everything in the first stage is yours to do with hand tools, and it is a solid two days of work you are otherwise paying a fabricator’s hourly rate for.
Two notes from the manufacturers that affect the budget. A shell with significant corrosion near the mounting points needs repair before a cage can be fitted to it, so it pays to lift the carpets and look before you book. And on an accident-damaged shell the advice is to straighten the car to suit the cage, because altering a homologated cage’s design takes its paperwork with it.
The headline quote is rarely the finished bill, and the gaps are predictable. Agree each of these up front and the invoice holds no surprises.
| The extra | What to budget |
|---|---|
| Strip and refit by the shop | £40 to £67.50 an hour plus VAT at the fitters that publish rates. A full strip and refit can be ten hours or more each way, and some fitters strip but do not refit at all. |
| Glass out and back in | Weld-in installs are glass-out jobs, and the windscreen going back in with a glazing firm usually sits outside the cage quote. |
| Dash removal and refit | Worth agreeing in writing. On one E30 install it accounted for most of a £500 difference between two versions of the same job. |
| Paint | Powder coat on a bolt-in cage before fitting runs £60 to £100. On a weld-in the paint goes on after the welding, so agree who is painting and to what finish. |
| Shell repairs found at strip-down | Corrosion near a mounting point gets repaired before the cage goes on. A look under the carpets before you book keeps this one off the invoice. |
| Certification paperwork | Custom Cages certificates run from £40 plus VAT for its own certificate to £80 plus VAT for the Motorsport UK and FIA versions. |
Where the car is going decides how much of the above you need. For track days, bolt-in or weld-in are both welcome and nobody will inspect the welds. For UK club competition under Motorsport UK rules, a bolt-in cage is fine when it is a homologated design or meets the tube and fixing specifications in the Yearbook. FIA rules (Appendix J Article 253-8) mount cage feet the same way, with at least three M8 8.8 bolts per foot onto reinforcement plates of at least 3 mm thickness and 120 cm2 welded to the shell, and they also allow the cage to be welded to the shell. Some series and international events specify a welded cage in their own regulations, so check yours before you buy.
For a competition car, the fitting and the paperwork happen together. Under the Custom Cages certification scheme the installer welds test pieces that are logged and load-tested, each welder’s approval stands for twelve months, and the fitment itself is signed off in two stages by video, once at tack-in before final welding is allowed to start, and again fully welded showing complete 360 degree welds on every tube.
Yes, and plenty of our customers do, with the welding of any shell plates left to someone who welds regularly. A half cage that uses existing mounting points is one to three hours. A full multipoint bolt-in is a weekend, with the slow parts being interior trimming and drilling the floor accurately, not the bolting itself. Get a second pair of hands for the main hoop, it is an awkward lift inside a car.
You do not have to, but you are paying a fabricator £40 to £67.50 an hour plus VAT to do work that needs nothing more than hand tools and patience. For weld-in jobs the manufacturers want the car close to a bare shell anyway, and at least one major fitter will strip a car but not refit it, so the refit is yours whatever happens.
A half cage can be a day or two. For weld-in work, two weeks in the workshop is the figure fitters publish, and full builds with paint and refit run to three. Book ahead too: good cage fitters have waiting lists, and the cage kits themselves can take four to six weeks to arrive in busy periods.
A bolt-in cage gets painted or powder coated before it goes in, which is £60 to £100 as a factory option on many of the cages we sell. A weld-in has to be painted after the welding, because the heat takes the finish off every joint. Either way, paint is usually its own line on the quote, so ask.
A bolt-in, often. For anything involving welding you want a motorsport fabricator, which costs no more per hour, and for a competition car you want one who can run the weld certification paperwork. The hourly rates are ordinary garage money, so there is no saving in going elsewhere.
It depends where the car is going. FIA-regulated internationals require welded cages, so there the question answers itself. For UK club events a homologated bolt-in is accepted, and for track days either is welcome. The bolt-in’s other advantage is that it comes back out, which matters if the car might be returned to road trim and sold on.
Usually because the two quotes describe different jobs. One assumes a stripped car, the other includes the stripping. One is welding plates only, the other includes trial-assembling the cage to position them. One includes paint and gussets, the other leaves them out. Ask each shop to list what is included and the gap generally closes.
No, we supply only, which is why this page can be straight with you about fitting money. What we will happily do is talk through which cage suits the car and the events you have in mind before you buy, so the fitting bill lands in the range you planned for.
For a first track car on a budget, a bolt-in kit fitted at home. A half cage is an afternoon, a full bolt-in is a weekend, and the fitting bill is zero. For a club competition build, a bolt-in with the plates welded by a motorsport fabricator, delivered stripped, with £500 to £900 set aside for the labour.
For anything running under FIA rules, the weld-in kit for your shell, a genuinely bare car, two weeks booked with a fitter who handles certification, £800 to £1,700 for the labour, and paint and refit agreed in writing before the car goes in.
The cage decides the fitting bill before any fitter sees the car, so the money conversation really starts at the point you choose between a half cage, a bolt-in and a weld-in. Get that call right for the events you actually plan to enter and the rest of the numbers on this page fall into place.
We stock around 1,500 cages across Safety Devices, Custom Cages, OMP, Sparco, JP and SW Motorsport, so whichever route fits your car and budget, the cage itself is the easy part. If you want a second opinion before you order, ask for me.
Do we sell T45 steel tube by the length? How T45 differs from CDS, and when a Custom Cages kit is the better buy, with live prices inc VAT.
Which seat belt bracket fits a BMW 2 Series F22 when you fit bucket seats? We go through the six F22 frames we list, the one that includes a belt buckle clip, and what the rest say about the buckle.
The Mini Coupé R58 has no rear seats, so there is nothing behind the seats for the shoulder straps. Here is the half cage and the wrap-around 4 point harness we suggest, with drawings of the strap path and angle.
An R53 owner wants a big Tillett such as the B10 XL on side mounts bolted straight to the floor, with no subframe. Here is what our R53 customer cars show, what the Cobra Mini mounts do, and how the width of each Tillett shell decides whether it goes in.
Can you change the rake of a reclining seat by setting a different height at the front and the back? No frame does it and our spacers lift the whole seat, so here is the own-spacer and longer bolt method, with the angle for each lift and the catch to watch.
Whether the Real Race 3 cell lumbar pad suits Corbeau PSR seats in a Rover Mini, the PSR pair with its inflatable lumbar option, and the Mini frames that take the seat.
Not sure what fits, which approval you need, or what to choose next? Ask Garreth and Cameron. You’ll get a practical answer from people who handle the kit every day.
