US auto repair universe, mapped
Ten brands, 6.8% of US auto repair shops. Two are collision chains. One is a Walmart bay. Snap-on sells to the rest.
Updated June 8, 2026
For shop management software, parts distributors, diagnostic equipment vendors, lenders, and payment processors selling into auto repair. The chain on the sign is often a franchise or buying-group affiliation. The owner running the bays decides.
Active US auto repair shop storefronts, June 2026
iSingle-shop independents: one owner, one address, one bay count
Narrower pure-play mechanical-repair count (mechanical and body only)
The top 10 chains
The ten largest US auto repair chains, by location count.
Ranked by US storefronts, not by revenue or segment. The category column is load-bearing: a Walmart tire bay and a Caliber body shop are different buyer profiles with different procurement paths. The full parent-company notes, including the Mavis Group rollup that puts one operator at 3,017 combined locations, are in Brand-by-brand below.
Who buys this data
B2B vendors selling into the full auto repair shop universe.
Seven buyer profiles, ranked by how often they pay for this file. Every one of them needs the owner who runs the bays, not the brand name on the sign.
Shop management software
SMS and shop management platforms
Tekmetric, Mitchell 1, Shop-Ware, AutoLeap, RepairShopr. Cloud SMS replacing 15-year-old desktop installs. The buyer is the owner of a one-to-eight-bay independent. No corporate procurement, no IT sign-off.
Get the sampleParts distribution
Parts programs and supply contracts
NAPA, AutoZone Commercial, O'Reilly First Call, Advance Professional. Route reps placing parts programs need the owner who signs the supply contract, not the tech who pulls the parts.
Get the sampleDiagnostic equipment
Scan tools, lifts, and alignment racks
Snap-on, Mac Tools, Matco. Tool truck reps need names and bay counts before they walk in. The independent owner decides the equipment spend; the purchase happens at the bay, not through procurement.
Get the sampleCapital and financing
Working capital and equipment finance
Working capital lenders, equipment finance, acquisition lending for owners buying a second or third shop. The base of 170,564 single-shop operators is a refinance and expansion pipeline that renews every credit cycle.
Get the samplePayment processing
Integrated payments and card-present
Bolt On Technology, integrated card-present processors aimed at the shop floor. Tied to whichever shop management system is on the counter. The owner decides the processor; the SMS vendor is often the channel.
Get the sampleMarketing and SEO
Local marketing and shop reputation
RepairPal certification, AutoVitals, Demandforce, local-SEO agencies. The market is local, the budget is monthly, and the buyer is the owner. Most independent shop owners run $500 to $2,000 per month on paid plus organic.
Get the sampleTraining and certification
ASE, OEM training, and tech recruiting
ASE certification, OEM training programs, technician recruiting platforms. They sell to the shop owner who has to hire and keep techs in a labour market that has been short for fifteen years.
Get the sampleSame data shape, different verticals: the how-many auto-repair shops sister page, the broader data insights index, and the full by-industry email lists.
The long version
Detail, on demand.
The headline figures you usually see, roughly 165,000 mechanical repair shops or 280,000 if you add tire and oil, come from once-a-year industry reports. They are accurate the day they ship and stale by month two. We work shop by shop, refresh on a rolling schedule, and tag each row with its sub-category so you can build the universe you actually sell into. For the full count-question version, see the companion how-many auto repair shops page.
How the shop count is built
- Start with every active US auto repair shop. Full-service general repair, oil change, tire and brake, transmission, and body shops. Not just mechanical repair.
- Tag each shop with its primary sub-category. Mechanical repair, oil change, tire and brake, body and collision, glass, or transmission. If you only sell DRP collision software, you buy the body-shop slice, not the full universe.
- Resolve each shop to a real operating business. The brand on the sign is often a franchise or buying-group affiliation. The operating business is the LLC or sole proprietor who holds the lease, the EPA tank registration, and the payroll for the techs.
- Find the owner. 75 percent of US auto repair shops are independent single-shop operators. Most never built a LinkedIn presence. We find them by name, with a verified email and a direct dial, the same way we do for every other long-tail vertical.
- Drop the dead pins. Closures, rebrands, shops that switched from oil change to detail, bays that moved to a new address. Annual reports carry them forward for a year. We do not.
- Refresh on a rolling schedule. Site-level signals run continuously against the universe of US small businesses, so the count you query in June is not the count from January.
If you want the source breakdown for a specific state, sub-category, or chain, ask. We do not hide the working.
Ranked by US storefront count, not by revenue or segment. The category column is load-bearing: a Walmart tire bay and a Caliber body shop are different buyer profiles with different procurement paths. The parent-company column shows who controls the budget at a multi-brand operator. The most important line: Mavis Tire, Midas, and Express Oil Change are all Mavis Group, putting the real largest multi-brand auto-services operator at 3,017 combined locations once you apply the parent rollup.
| # | Brand | Category | US locations | Parent / note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Walmart Auto Care Centers | Retail-attached TLE | 2,511 | Walmart Inc. In-store tire and lube bays inside Walmart supercenters. Not a freestanding chain in the prospecting sense. Most B2B vendors exclude this row from their addressable market because buying is corporate procurement, not a local owner decision. |
| 2 | Caliber Collision | Collision | 2,038 | PE-owned by Hellman & Friedman plus Leonard Green. Pure collision repair. Belongs to the collision-chain conversation, not the general-repair or oil-change segment. |
| 3 | Valvoline Instant Oil Change | Quick-lube | 2,016 | NYSE:VVV. Drive-through oil change only; no full mechanical work. The buyer for shop management software here is corporate, not a local operator. |
| 4 | Jiffy Lube | Quick-lube | 1,896 | Owned by Shell. Heavily franchised. The operator is a local multi-unit franchisee with two to forty locations, not Shell corporate. Franchise agreements run through the area developers. |
| 5 | Firestone Complete Auto Care | Tire + general repair | 1,770 | Owned by Bridgestone. Tire-led but does meaningful mechanical work: brake, alignment, suspension. Mostly company-operated, so the buyer for add-on services is Bridgestone Americas, not a local owner. |
| 6 | Mavis Tire | Tire + repair | 1,526 | PE-owned by BayPine and TSG. Rolls up NTB (250) and Tire Kingdom (192) internally. On a parent-rollup basis, Mavis Group (Mavis Tire + Midas + Express Oil Change) operates 3,017 US locations and is the largest multi-brand auto-services operator in the country. |
| 7 | Take 5 Car Wash* | Car wash | 1,413 | Divested by Driven Brands to Whistle Express in February 2025. This row may be stale by ingest. By the next refresh the locations should roll to Whistle Express or drop from the top 10 if the brand has been split across operators. |
| 8 | Discount Tire | Tire retail | 1,104 | Privately held. Tire retail with installation. Light on mechanical work, heavy on volume. The B2B conversation is with equipment and payment vendors, not parts programs. |
| 9 | Midas Auto Experts | Mechanical repair + brakes | 1,067 | Owned by Mavis Group after the 2025 acquisition. The only pure-play mechanical-repair brand in the top 10. Combined with Mavis Tire and Express Oil Change, Mavis Group reaches 3,017 US locations across three chain labels. |
| 10 | Gerber Collision & Glass | Collision + glass | 896 | Boyd Group (TSX:BYD). Second-largest collision chain after Caliber, with glass work attached. Like Caliber, belongs to the collision-chain segment rather than general repair or oil change. |
Rows reflect the primary brand label in our ingest. The Mavis Group parent rollup is noted in each relevant row. Take 5 Car Wash is asterisked: Driven Brands divested the brand to Whistle Express in February 2025 and the row may be stale. Excluded from the main table: Circle K (1,014 locations), miscategorised as auto service in the raw ingest. Source: Orbital data team, June 2026 snapshot.
The five largest states carry 30.6 percent of the full universe. California and Texas alone hold over 18 percent, driven by Los Angeles, the Inland Empire, Houston, and Dallas-Fort Worth, the four metros with the densest independent-shop counts in the country. Sun Belt vehicle miles and an older fleet age (the US average crossed 12.6 years in 2025) keep those four markets oversized versus population. For vendor territory planning, raw counts are what matters.
| # | State | Auto repair shops | Share of US total |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | California | 21,939 | 9.65% |
| 2 | Texas | 19,663 | 8.65% |
| 3 | Florida | 12,761 | 5.61% |
| 4 | Pennsylvania | 7,660 | 3.37% |
| 5 | New York | 7,574 | 3.33% |
| 6 | Illinois | 6,337 | 2.79% |
| 7 | North Carolina | 6,207 | 2.73% |
| 8 | Ohio | 6,205 | 2.73% |
| 9 | Georgia | 6,143 | 2.70% |
| 10 | Michigan | 5,288 | 2.33% |
| 11 | Virginia | 4,179 | 1.84% |
| 12 | New Jersey | 4,175 | 1.84% |
| 13 | Arizona | 4,038 | 1.78% |
| 14 | Tennessee | 3,892 | 1.71% |
| 15 | Indiana | 3,772 | 1.66% |
Percentages computed against the national total. The dataset itself is exact, down to the shop address and bay count. Source: Orbital data team, June 2026 snapshot. Sister page: How many auto repair shops in the US for the count-question version.
We believe
If you assume you can reach this market through 50 enterprise logos, you are pricing for a TAM that does not exist.
75 percent of US auto repair shops are single-shop independents. Even after a decade of PE rollups, Mavis acquiring Midas, Driven Brands consolidating quick-lube, Caliber and Service King consolidating collision, and Take 5’s car-wash buildout and divestiture, the 10 biggest chains by brand hold roughly 6.8 percent of storefronts. The TAM is not 50 logos. The TAM is single-shop operators and the few thousand multi-unit operators who also pick up their own phones.
We watched a shop-management software team run the enterprise motion for two years. They signed three of the top 10 brands and missed plan every quarter, because the average deal was 800 bays under one procurement contract and they had built a sales team sized for 200-bay deals. The motion that finally worked was the opposite: pull a territory file of independents in three states, route it to four AEs, hit the owner with a thirty-second pitch and a sample login. The independents close in days, not nine months, and they renew because the owner is the user.
Do not buy this if any of the following are true.
You only sell to enterprise body-shop franchise networks. If your motion is one annual contract with Caliber and one with Service King, the long-tail independents are too small to matter. You need two procurement contacts, not a six-figure record file. Save your budget.
Your sales motion only fires above 50 locations per logo. If your cycle is built for a nine-month RFP, you want the top 30 brands and their procurement contacts. We can pull a chain-grain file, but the single-shop operators are not your buyer at that deal size.
You sell auto-parts retail to consumers. Drivers buying their own tires, wipers, or batteries: this is operator-side data, not consumer-side. Different shape, different licence.
You need real-time technician availability or repair-order pricing. Those signals live inside the shop management systems themselves, Mitchell 1, Tekmetric, Shop-Ware. We map the universe of shops and owners, not the live ticket queue.
If you Google “how many auto repair shops in the US,” the top results circle around three different numbers: roughly 280,000 once you include oil-change and tire, around 234,000 if you count only service outlets, and about 165,000 if you narrow to pure mechanical repair. All three are right inside their own definition. Pick the one that matches what you sell.
The published reports also work at the chain or industry-segment grain. They tell you Caliber has 2,038 shops, Valvoline has 2,016, Mavis has 1,526. They cannot tell you the name and phone number of the owner of Mike’s Auto Repair on West Lake Street in Indianapolis, who runs four bays, took over from his father in 2018, and is the person who decides whether your shop management software gets installed next Tuesday. That gap is structural. Subscription data brokers index by company website, so an independent four-bay shop with no web presence is invisible.
This is exactly what Orbital was built for. We map the universe of US small and mid-market businesses, find the owner of each one, and validate the contact before it reaches you. Nothing about that is auto-repair-specific, which is why we map dentists, HVAC contractors, med spas, gas stations, and restaurants the same way. What is specific to auto repair is the sub-category tagging on top: mechanical, oil change, tire, brake, body, glass, transmission. Plus bay count, brand affiliation, and shop management system in use where we can verify it.
The chain-level industry reports are excellent inside their definitions. They are also annual or semi-annual. For a vendor doing outbound this quarter, the question is which single-shop owners are open this Monday and which owner picks up the phone. That is the gap a shop-by-shop, owner-by-owner map closes.
Questions
Before you ask sales about auto-repair data.
How many auto-repair shops are in the US?
The Orbital universe is 227,418 when you count the full scope: full-service general repair, oil change, tire and brake, transmission, and body shops. The narrower pure-play mechanical-repair figure is around 165,000. Both are correct; they answer different questions. See the sub-category breakdown on the companion how-many page.
What is the difference between the 227k figure and the narrower 165k figure?
The narrower count covers only general automotive repair, mostly mechanical, body, and glass. The fuller Orbital scope rolls in tire and brake shops, oil-change quick-lube, and transmission specialists because vendors selling into the shop floor often sell across those sub-categories. If you are sizing a market for pure-play mechanical repair, use 165,000. If you sell shop management software, payment, or marketing services, the broader figure is closer to your true addressable market.
Who is the largest pure-play mechanical-repair chain in the US?
Midas Auto Experts, with 1,067 US locations, is the largest brand whose primary service is mechanical repair, brakes, and exhaust. Midas was acquired by the Mavis Group in 2025, so on a parent-company basis the answer is Mavis Group, which combines Mavis Tire, Midas, and Express Oil Change for around 3,017 US locations total.
Is Walmart Auto Care really a chain in the B2B sense?
Technically yes, practically no. Walmart Auto Care Centers are tire and lube bays inside Walmart supercenters, with 2,511 of them. They are not freestanding repair shops, they share the supercenter P&L, and most B2B vendors selling shop software or marketing services exclude Walmart from their addressable market because the buying process is corporate procurement, not a local shop owner decision. We list it for completeness, then footnote it.
What happened to Take 5 Car Wash?
Driven Brands divested Take 5 Car Wash to Whistle Express in February 2025. The 1,413 locations should now sit under the Whistle Express umbrella. The row on this page is asterisked because our June 2026 ingest may still be carrying pre-divestiture chain labels. By the next refresh those locations will roll up to Whistle Express, or drop out of the top 10 if the brand has been split across operators.
Can I filter by sub-category, such as mechanical vs collision vs tire?
Yes. Every shop in the dataset is tagged with its primary sub-category: mechanical repair, oil change, tire, body and collision, glass, or transmission. If you only sell collision DRP software, you can pull the roughly 22,000 body shops without paying for the mechanical and tire independents you do not want.
How concentrated is the auto repair market?
Not very. The 10 largest chains by storefront hold roughly 6.8 percent of the full US auto repair universe, after stripping out the misclassified Circle K rows and footnoting Take 5 Car Wash. Three-quarters of US auto repair shops are single-shop independents. Even after a decade of PE rollups in collision, tire, and quick-lube, this is structurally the most fragmented multi-hundred-billion-dollar B2B vertical in the country.
When is this dataset the wrong fit?
If your sales motion only fires above 50 locations per logo, you do not need this file. You need the top 30 brands and their procurement contacts. If you sell auto-parts retail to consumers buying their own tires or wipers, this is operator-side data, not consumer-side. If you only sell into enterprise body-shop franchise networks like Caliber and Service King, the long-tail independents are not your buyer.
See the auto-repair owner dataset before you pay for it.
Tell us the states, sub-categories, or chain affiliations you want. We send a free sample of around 100 verified owner records, mechanical shops, body shops, tire shops, or the full mix, so you can check them against your own pipeline before anything changes hands. No commitment, no email-list back-and-forth. For the full count breakdown, see the companion how-many-auto-repair-shops page.
Get the sample