Business Data & Benchmarks · United States

Auto Repair Shop Revenue and Continuation Benchmark

General mechanical repair for cars and light trucks, from engine work to brakes and diagnostics.

NAICS 811111, 2022 editionUnited States data by defaultSources and dates shown

Average Auto Repair Shop Revenue per Year 2022 Economic Census

General automotive repair forms its own 2022 Economic Census category; the published employer establishment count and combined receipts produce the average below.

≈$840,000 /year

Average annual gross revenue per employer establishment

84,104

Employer establishments in the United States, 2022

as published $71 billion

Combined annual gross revenue of employer establishments, 2022

How this is calculated: about $71 billion in combined annual revenue divided by 84,104 employer establishments works out to $840,000. This is an average per establishment, and averages get pulled up by large, busy operations, so a typical business may sit below it.

Scope: General Automotive Repair (NAICS 811111). General automotive repair only; specialty shops such as transmission or body work are separate categories. Employer establishments only: owner-operated businesses with no paid employees are not in these figures.

General auto repair mixes labor billed by the hour with parts sold at a markup, which is why its payroll share sits lower than in pure service trades. Specialty shops such as body work, glass or oil change chains are separate census categories and are not in this average.

Revenue here splits between labor hours, which bays and lifts cap, and parts sold at a markup; the payroll share below reflects only the labor side of that split.

Source US Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census, Summary Statistics (ECNBASIC): ESTAB, RCPTOT and PAYANN by NAICS · Vintage 2022 Economic Census · Calculation BusinessNES · Accessed July 2026

Where these figures come from
Establishment counts and combined receipts are published figures from the official source named in each figure's source line. BusinessNES divides one by the other and rounds to the nearest $10,000; no other adjustment is made. The full chain from published figure to this page is described on the methodology page.

Data Source Notice

This product uses the Census Bureau Data API but is not endorsed or certified by the Census Bureau.

Figures above are from the 2022 Economic Census reference year, released by the Census Bureau in 2024 and 2025; markets have moved since.

Employer Establishments at Year Five Industry group

Automotive repair and maintenance, NAICS 8111, the 2018 starting count compared with the count of five-year-old establishments in 2023.

59.2%the year-five count as a share of the starting count

Five-year establishment continuation benchmarkLine chart of industry continuation: 80.0 percent at 1 year, 71.5 percent at 2 years, 66.9 percent at 3 years, 62.9 percent at 4 years, 59.2 percent at 5 years. 9,880 establishments first reported paid employment in 2018; BusinessNES calculation from Census BDS.100%75%50%25%0%2014-2018 cohort range: 57.3 to 60.2 percentStart: 100 percent, the starting count1 year: 80.0 percent of the starting count2 years: 71.5 percent of the starting count3 years: 66.9 percent of the starting count4 years: 62.9 percent of the starting count5 years: 59.2 percent of the starting count80.071.566.962.959.2Start1 year2 years3 years4 years5 years9,880 establishments first reported paid employment in 2018; BusinessNES calculation from Census BDS.
Five years on, this industry group counted about 59 establishments aged five for every 100 that first reported paid employment in 2018. Census compares counts by age rather than following the same businesses, so read it as a broad continuation indicator for the industry group, not as a tracked survival rate.

Across the 2014 to 2018 cohorts, five-year results ranged from 57.3 to 60.2 percent. This benchmark covers Automotive repair and maintenance, NAICS 8111, as a whole. It is not a survival rate for general automotive repair shops on their own: they are 84,104 of the 167,855 employer establishments in that group, about 50 percent of it. How this is measured

Payroll as a Share of Revenue Official data

Technicians are billed by the book hour; the verified share below shows what that labor model costs the category.

Cost lineShare of receipts
Annual payroll share of receipts, United States≈26%

Payroll share of receipts, General Automotive Repair, United States, 2022 Economic Census.

Approximately 26.0 percent of every revenue dollar in this category goes to annual payroll. As the census defines it, payroll includes wages, salaries, reported tips, commissions and bonuses; it excludes employer-paid benefits, employer payroll taxes, contractor payments and owner compensation. Treat it as one verified anchor, not a full labor cost breakdown. Flat-rate pay means a technician's clocked hours and billed hours diverge; payroll tracks the book, not the clock.

This is not total labor cost or profit margin.

How to read this number
Payroll here is the census annual payroll figure, PAYANN: it includes wages, salaries, reported tips, commissions and bonuses paid to employees, and it excludes employer-paid benefits, employer payroll taxes, contractor payments and proprietor compensation. BusinessNES divides it by the same category total receipts, RCPTOT, and rounds to a whole percent.

Position Within Its Comparison Group Computed from official data

Where this category sits among 7 automotive service categories in the same 2022 Economic Census release. Ranks and the group median are computed on exact values, before the rounding used above.

MeasureThis categoryGroup medianRank
Revenue per employer establishment$844,225$844,2254 of 7
Payroll share of receipts26.41%26.82%5 of 7
Employer establishments84,1049,8931 of 7

Position among 7 automotive service categories, 2022 Economic Census, employer establishments only.

This category ranks 4th of 7 by average annual revenue per employer establishment. It ranks 1st of 7 by employer establishment count and 5th of 7 by payroll share. Payroll equals 26.41 percent of receipts here, 0.41 percentage points below the group median of 26.82 percent. A higher or lower position is not a measure of profit or of business quality: the census reports receipts and payroll only.

Compared With Similar Business Types Computed from official data

The 4 categories closest to this one by average revenue inside the same comparison group.

Census categoryRevenue per establishmentPayroll shareEstablishments
General Automotive Repair (this page)$844,22526.41%84,104
Car Washes$762,43429.85%19,422
Specialized Automotive Repair$735,05325.94%8,042
Automotive Oil Change and Lubrication Shops$975,11026.82%9,893
All Other Automotive Repair and Maintenance$674,37326.97%4,813

Nearest categories by average revenue, 2022 Economic Census, employer establishments only.

This category reports lower revenue per employer establishment than Automotive Oil Change and Lubrication Shops, and higher revenue than Car Washes, Specialized Automotive Repair and All Other Automotive Repair and Maintenance. It contains more employer establishments than all four of them. Every figure in this table comes from the same 2022 Economic Census release and the same employer establishment population, so the columns are directly comparable.

Beyond the Benchmark BusinessNES analysis

What the census figures leave out about general automotive repair shops, and what to look at instead.

What the numbers do not show

The census counts receipts, so it cannot see the split that decides whether a shop is comfortable or fragile: how much of the work comes from fleets and contracts, and how much walks in off the street. Two shops with the same revenue can face completely different mornings, one working a booked schedule of vans, the other waiting to see who arrives.

It also cannot see the age of the equipment. A scan tool that cannot talk to recent vehicles quietly narrows the addressable market every year, and the effect shows up as slowly declining work rather than as a single bad month.

Operator lens

  • A busy shop is not always a resilient shop. Look at how much of the schedule depends on one technician, one insurer or one fleet account. Concentration is invisible in revenue and decisive in a sale.
  • Payroll share moves with wages, pricing and how much of the work is parts rather than labor. The share published above prices the labor side of that, though it cannot show how much of the gap between a comfortable shop and a tight one comes from idle bays rather than from pricing or parts mix.

Questions to ask before starting or buying

  • Where does the work come from? Ask for the share of revenue tied to fleet or contract accounts, and whether those agreements transfer with the sale. Retail loyalty usually attaches to the technician rather than to the shop name.
  • Who actually fixes the cars? Find out how long the lead technician has been there and whether they are staying. In this trade, the diagnostic ability of one or two people often carries the whole operation.
  • What can the bays not do? Check which model years, drivetrains and systems the shop turns away, and what it would cost in tooling and training to stop turning them away.
  • How is the property held? Lifts, drains and ventilation make relocation expensive, so a short lease on a good site is a different risk from the same revenue on owned premises.
  • What is the warranty exposure? Ask how comebacks are recorded and paid for. A shop with no record of them either has none or does not track them, and one of those is much worse than the other.

Models worth considering

  • Specialize where the dealer stops Vehicles fall out of dealer coverage long before they leave the road. Building genuine competence in one make or one system creates referral flow that general repair rarely produces.
  • Sell the inspection, not the repair A paid pre-purchase inspection service reaches buyers before they own the car, and it converts into repair work on terms set by the shop rather than by an emergency.
  • Make the wait useful Shops that solve the customer's day, through loaners, pickup or honest scheduling, compete on something no invoice line shows and price alone cannot match.

Explore More on BusinessNES

More BusinessNES guides and rankings, plus neighboring benchmark pages built from the same verified data.

Sources and Methodology

Every figure on this page is bound to a published source, and each figure's own source line names that source precisely: the 2022 Economic Census for counts, receipts and payroll, and the Census Bureau's Business Dynamics Statistics for the industry continuation benchmark. Where a page shows a sector survival curve instead, that series comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

BusinessNES performs the arithmetic on those published figures and nothing else. Receipts are divided by establishments, and payroll by receipts. The age-five establishment count is divided by the age-zero establishment count for the same four-digit industry group, then repeated across five age-zero cohorts to give a reference and a range. This category's share of its industry group, along with the ranks, medians and nearest peers in the comparison sections, comes from the same published tables. Every one of them is recomputed from the sealed source files at each release and blocks publication if it does not match. Results are rounded and marked approximate. The reference year is 2022 for revenue and payroll; treat every figure as a baseline, not today's market.

Category scope matters: these figures cover General Automotive Repair (NAICS 811111), employer establishments only. The scope note near the top of the page explains what that includes and excludes for this business type. Body shops, transmission specialists and oil change chains live in neighboring codes, not this one.

Full method, sources and limits
The methodology page describes the full chain for every figure on this site: the published source, the sealed snapshot it was read from, the exact calculation if BusinessNES performed one, and the honest limits of scope and vintage. Read the methodology.

Spotted an error? Corrections are logged and published. Business data and benchmarks by BusinessNES.