What an Empty Service Bay Costs a Dealership

By Larry Sherwood Jr., founder · Updated October 9, 2026

An empty lift is the most expensive open position in the building, because the work is already on the schedule. The customer booked the appointment. The car is in the lot. There is nobody to turn the wrench.

The production of one technician

A technician's production is billed hours times the labor rate. NADA puts the average customer mechanical labor rate at $186 an hour for 2025,¹ rising to $192 in the first half of 2026.² The hours depend on the tech. From what we see recruiting technicians, a typical month of billed hours runs about 160 for a master technician, 130 for a certified technician and 95 for a qualified technician.¹³ Here is how we define each level.

Those are labor dollars only. The parts on the same repair orders come on top: NADA's 2025 totals put customer-pay mechanical parts at about $0.77 for every $1 of customer-pay mechanical labor,¹ so a certified tech's lift also moves about $18,619 a month in parts. NADA's own totals point the same way: across every franchised dealership, labor works out to about $20,274 per technician per month, or about 109 billed hours at $186, counting every level from apprentice to master.¹

An independent estimate lands in the same neighborhood: data from Sonic USA, published by MOTOR, found that the average shop can lose $20,000 to $25,000 a month for every consistently vacant bay.⁸

The shortage makes it worse

NADA estimates that about 39,000 new service technicians graduate each year, while the industry needs to replace nearly 76,000, a shortfall of about 37,000 technicians a year.⁷ TechForce Foundation's 2026 report counts about 42,000 new automotive technician graduates a year against about 70,000 job openings.³⁷ A lift that sits empty is not waiting on a flood of applicants. The techs you want are working somewhere else, and they move when someone calls them with a better plan and a real conversation about their flag sheet.