Service management platform Fullbay has released its fifth annual State of Heavy-Duty Repair report, highlighting key trends in the commercial repair industry.
Produced in partnership with the Technology & Maintenance Council, and released at its spring meetings, the report found shops assess their labor rates a year, something Fullbay CEO Patrick McKittrick said should be done more frequently.
“While the industry has done a nice job adjusting rates, I think they have left money on the table,” he said during a press conference. “Evaluating labor rates once a year is not enough. Interest rates don’t change once a year. Tariffs don’t come and go once a year.”
Other trends covered in the report include: Labor rates rose by more than $4/hour each year, with a $9 jump since 2023 from $125/hour to $134 (all figures USD); only 66% of shops surveyed offered health benefits to technicians; shops collected a 21% margin, on average, for parts; 36% of shops do not offer apprenticeship programs; shops reported a 7.2% increase in cost for mobile repair labor; and technician pay climbed 7.4% year over year from 2023 to 2024 and 3.4% from 2024 to 2025.
Data was collected from surveys of nearly 1,000 industry professionals in the U.S. and Canada. Overall, 56% of respondents reported 2024 was either significantly better, or slightly better, than 2023 while only 3% the year was a lot worse.
However, Jack Poster, VMRS service manager with TMC, said that could change this year given the uncertainty tariffs have introduced to the industry.
“Two to three weeks ago, there was a lot of optimism. Tariffs have thrown a curveball at everybody,” Poster said at the press conference.
The report also provides insights that can help independent shop owners runner better businesses. McKittrick noted more than 40% of shop owners don’t craft a budget and business plan for the year.
Technician pay is now $30 per hour, up from $27 an hour in 2023 and McKittrick said “Demand will continue to go up. The supply side of the labor equation is the really troubling part. I think you’ll see even as inflation cools off, the technician pay rate will continue to rise because of that tension between the supply and demand of that labor force. We are still not bringing enough people into the trade. The only way to compete for that scarce resource is to pay more.”
McKittrick also said shops need to begin exploring artificial intelligence, which can help them manage inventories, among other things. “I still think predictive maintenance is the real best use case for AI,” he said. “If you can use AI to figure out, when this set of circumstances exist, something else is likely to happen in the future and then proactively address that issue, I think that’s going to be a really big one for us.”
The report also highlighted an escalation of fraud, with 35% of shops reporting they’d been defrauded or scammed. There was also an increase in so-called “friendly fraud,” in which known customers will dispute credit card charges.
McKittrick urged shop managers to be wary of suspicious orders, especially from new customers who place unusually large orders.
“A fleet that’s big enough to order 100 tires isn’t randomly calling a shop,” he warned. While most fraud attempts are discovered somewhere during the process, shops are still having to spend time and resources fighting to resolve them.
The full report can be downloaded here.
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