People ask this question two ways. A shop owner asks it to find out whether they are behind. Someone thinking about opening a shop asks it to find out whether the whole idea is worth it. The search results answer both with the same confident per-shop figure, and, as with the profit margin number and the labor rate tables, we went looking for where it came from.
There are exactly two public datasets on this, and they do not talk to each other.
The two numbers that exist
The Census Bureau runs a Quarterly Services Survey, and one of its lines is total revenue for NAICS 8111, automotive repair and maintenance, at establishments subject to federal income tax. The four quarters through June 2026 add up to about $196 billion: $48.5 billion in Q3 2025, $48.7 billion in Q4, $48.0 billion in Q1 2026, and $51.2 billion in Q2 2026. Q2 is the biggest quarter, which anyone who has watched the lot fill up the week after tax refunds land already knew.
That $196 billion is the whole trade. NAICS 8111 covers body shops, oil-change chains, glass, and car washes alongside general mechanical repair, so it is not a number you can divide by your kind of shop.
The count that matches your kind of shop comes from a different agency. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages puts NAICS 811111, general automotive repair, at 86,299 private establishments in the fourth quarter of 2025, employing about 398,000 people, at an average wage of $1,226 a week. A year earlier it was 86,046 establishments at $1,170 a week. The industry is not growing in shop count. It is growing in what it pays the people in the bays, about 5% in a year.
Now try to combine them. $196 billion of 8111 revenue divided by 86,299 establishments of 811111 gives you a large, meaningless number, because the numerator is the whole trade and the denominator is one slice of it with employees only. There is no public 811111 revenue line more recent than the 2017 Economic Census, and the 2022 Economic Census tables sit behind a data portal that no free article is actually quoting.
The only honest division
IBISWorld’s free page does publish a pair that share a definition: $92.1 billion across roughly 307,000 U.S. auto mechanics businesses in 2026. That divides to about $300,000 per business.
Read that carefully before you compare yourself to it. 307,000 businesses against 86,299 employer establishments means the majority of what IBISWorld counts has no employees. A mobile mechanic with a van and an LLC is in there. So is the guy doing brake jobs out of a two-car garage on weekends. The $300,000 average is dragged toward the floor by every one of them, which means a shop with a building, a lift, and a writer at the counter averages a good deal more, and nobody publishes how much more.
That is the whole public record. Everything else you’ll find, the “$500k to $1.5M for a typical independent” ranges, the state tables, traces to a vendor’s customer base or to nothing at all.
Your number is two lines of arithmetic
Revenue is car count times average repair order. That’s it.
Take a real week. Count the ROs you closed. Add up what they billed. Divide the second by the first and you have your ARO. Multiply by the cars you actually see in a year, not the cars you’d see if every bay stayed full, and you have your annual revenue to within whatever your slow months do to you.
As pure arithmetic, so nobody mistakes it for a benchmark: a shop closing 35 ROs a week at a $450 average, open 50 weeks, bills $787,500. Move the ARO to $600 by selling the work the inspection already found and the same 35 cars bill $1,050,000. Same rent, same techs, same lot.
The two levers inside ARO are the ones the labor rate calculator and the parts matrix calculator exist for: what an hour actually collects, and what a part actually marks up to. Neither changes your car count. Both change your revenue on the cars you already have.
Where the revenue question goes wrong
Higher revenue is not a better shop, and this trade is unusually good at proving it. A $1,400 ticket that is $1,100 in parts at a 20% markup and 2.5 hours of labor reads as a great day on the revenue line and contributes less to the business than a $600 ticket that is mostly labor. Two shops with identical annual revenue can be a comfortable living and a slow bankruptcy, and the revenue figure can’t tell you which. That is the profit margin question, and it has its own post because it has its own math.
The other wrong turn is the growth reflex. The BLS count says the number of shops is flat year over year while wages climb 5%. The revenue that exists is being split among the same number of doors by people who cost more to employ. A shop that grows revenue by adding a bay is taking on a fixed cost to chase a market that isn’t adding cars. A shop that grows revenue by raising ARO on the cars it already has is not.
What the software does and doesn’t do here
BayDocket’s owner reports show car count, ARO, labor revenue and parts margin from your own closed repair orders, on demand instead of at tax time. That gives you the two inputs above without a spreadsheet. It does not tell you what a shop like yours “should” make, because, as this whole post has been saying, no one has that number to give you.
If you want to see the report against realistic data before believing it, open the demo. No signup, nothing to cancel.