US auto-service universe, mapped
Largest Auto Repair Chains in the US: 565,196 Locations, Top 10 Hold ~2.7%
Across mechanical, oil change, tire, body, glass, wash, and detail. The brand on the sign is rarely the buyer. The owner running the shop is.
The count, in plain English
What 565,196 actually covers.
Across mechanical repair, oil change, tire, body, glass, car wash, and detail, the US has 565,196 auto-service storefronts. After excluding misclassified rows, the 10 largest chains operate roughly 2.7% of them. 76.6% are single-shop independents. ZoomInfo and Apollo index by company website; the 432,800 single-shop independents without one are invisible to them.
The market, in three numbers
A long tail of single-shop operators.
are single-shop independents
432,800 of the 565,196 US auto-service locations are owned by an operator who runs exactly one shop. Not a chain. Not a franchise. One owner, one bay count, one phone number.
held by the top 10 chains
After dropping the misclassified Circle K rows and footnoting Take 5 Car Wash, the 10 largest brands operate roughly 15,402 of the 565,196 locations. The rest is independents and small regionals.
Mavis Group sites, the actual largest operator
Mavis Tire plus Midas plus Express Oil Change, all under the Mavis Group parent after the 2025 Midas acquisition. The headline chain table understates the real top operator unless you roll parents up.
Sources: Orbital classifier, market Auto Shops and Services, refreshed June 2026. Parent-company rollup reconciled against Mavis Group public statements and IBISWorld auto-service operator data.
Methodology
Why our auto-service count moves and the published estimates do not.
The headline figures you usually see, 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 monthly, and tag each row with its sub-category so you can build the universe you actually sell into.
How the 565,196 figure is built
- Start with every active US auto-service site.
- Tag each shop with its primary sub-category. Mechanical repair, oil change, tire, body and collision, glass, car wash, detail, towing, or transmission. So if you only sell DRP collision software, you can buy 22,000 rows, not 565,196.
- Resolve each shop to a real operating business. The brand on the sign is often a franchise or a 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. 76.6 percent of US auto-service locations are independent single-shop operators. Most of those owners 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, sites that switched from oil change to detail, shops that moved to a different bay address. The annual reports keep them on 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.
By state
Where the auto-service shops actually are.
The five largest states carry 37.9 percent of the universe. California and Texas alone hold over 22 percent. Per capita the table looks different, but for vendor territory planning, raw counts are what matters.
| # | State | Auto-service locations | Share of US total |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | California | 54,527 | 11.95% |
| 2 | Texas | 48,867 | 10.71% |
| 3 | Florida | 31,715 | 6.95% |
| 4 | Pennsylvania | 19,038 | 4.17% |
| 5 | New York | 18,823 | 4.13% |
| 6 | Illinois | 15,747 | 3.45% |
| 7 | North Carolina | 15,428 | 3.38% |
| 8 | Ohio | 15,422 | 3.38% |
| 9 | Georgia | 15,267 | 3.35% |
| 10 | Michigan | 13,141 | 2.88% |
| 11 | Virginia | 10,385 | 2.28% |
| 12 | New Jersey | 10,375 | 2.27% |
| 13 | Arizona | 10,035 | 2.20% |
| 14 | Tennessee | 9,672 | 2.12% |
| 15 | Indiana | 9,374 | 2.06% |
Source: Orbital classifier, market Auto Shops and Services, June 2026. Percentages computed against the 565,196 national total. Sister page: How many auto repair shops in the US for the count-question version.
Read this before the chain table
What's inside the 565,196.
Orbital's Auto Shops and Services market rolls up mechanical repair, oil change, tire, body and collision, glass, car wash, detail, towing, and transmission. The 565,196 universe and the table below reflect that breadth, not pure-play mechanical repair. Each row is tagged with its sub-category so you can filter to the slice you actually sell into.
The top 10 chains
Largest auto-service chains by US storefront count.
Ranked by US locations after dropping the misclassified Circle K rows from the raw classifier output. Each row is tagged with its sub-category, because lumping a Walmart tire bay and a Caliber body shop together is how you end up with a TAM number that means nothing.
| # | Brand | US locations | Category | Parent / note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Walmart Auto Care Centers | 2,511 | Retail-attached TLE | 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. |
| 2 | Caliber Collision | 2,038 | Collision | PE-owned by Hellman and Friedman plus Leonard Green. Pure collision repair, belongs to the upcoming /data/largest-collision-repair-chains-in-the-us/ sister page rather than the mechanical-repair conversation. |
| 3 | Valvoline Instant Oil Change | 2,016 | Quick-lube | NYSE:VVV. Drive-through oil change, no full mechanical work. The buyer for shop management software here is corporate, not local. |
| 4 | Jiffy Lube | 1,896 | Quick-lube | Owned by Shell. Heavily franchised, so the operator is a local multi-unit franchisee with two to forty locations, not Shell corporate. |
| 5 | Firestone Complete Auto Care | 1,770 | Tire + general repair | Owned by Bridgestone. Tire-led but does meaningful mechanical work, brake, alignment, suspension. Mostly company-operated. |
| 6 | Mavis Tire | 1,526 | Tire + repair | PE-owned by BayPine and TSG. Already rolls up the NTB (250) and Tire Kingdom (192) banners internally. See parent-rollup footnote below. |
| 7 | Take 5 Car Wash* | 1,413 | Car wash | 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 out. |
| 8 | Discount Tire | 1,104 | Tire retail | Privately held. Tire retail with installation. Light on mechanical work, heavy on volume. |
| 9 | Midas Auto Experts | 1,067 | Mechanical repair + brakes | Owned by Mavis Group after the 2025 acquisition. The only pure-play mechanical-repair brand in the top 10. See the mini-callout below for the real mechanical-repair rankings. |
| 10 | Gerber Collision & Glass | 896 | Collision + glass | Boyd Group (TSX:BYD). Second-largest collision chain after Caliber, with glass attached. |
Footnotes and excluded rows
Excluded: Circle K (1,014 locations). Convenience-store and gas, mis-bucketed by classifier. NAICS 447110, not auto service. Engineering ticket filed against the classifier.
Mavis Group combined. Mavis Tire (1,526) plus Midas (1,067) plus Express Oil Change (424) = 3,017 US locations across three Orbital chain entities. Mavis is the largest multi-brand auto-services operator in the US by storefront once the parent rollup is applied. The chain table above lists each brand separately because that is how the operator runs them, but vendors prospecting at a parent-company grain should price Mavis as a single account.
Largest pure-play mechanical-repair brands
If you specifically want mechanical-repair brands, not collision, tire, oil, wash, or glass, the rankings shift dramatically. By US storefront count, the largest pure-play mechanical-repair chains are:
| # | Brand | US locations |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Midas Auto Experts | 1,067 |
| 2 | Pep Boys | 748 |
| 3 | Meineke Car Care Centers | 738 |
| 4 | Quick Lane Tire & Auto Center | 510 |
| 5 | Express Oil Change & Tire Engineers | 424 |
| 6 | Big O Tires | 410 |
| 7 | Christian Brothers Automotive | 308 |
| 8 | AAMCO Transmissions | 280 |
| 9 | Tuffy Tire & Auto Service | 165 |
| 10 | Precision Tune Auto Care | 140 |
Mechanical-repair brands sized at the storefront grain. Combined, these 10 brands operate roughly 4,800 US locations, or about 2.9 percent of the ~165,000 NAICS 8111 pure-mechanical universe. The structural conclusion does not change: even the mechanical-only slice is dominated by independents.
Our take
Auto services is the most fragmented multi-hundred-billion-dollar B2B vertical in the country.
We believe
If you assume you can reach this market through 50 enterprise logos, you are pricing for a TAM that does not exist.
76.6 percent of the 565,196 US auto-service locations 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, Take 5's car-wash buildout and then divestiture, the 10 biggest chains combined own less storefront share, roughly 2.7 percent, than Rollins owns of pest control alone. The TAM is not 50 logos. The TAM is 432,800 independents and one Mavis Group.
We watched a shop-management software team work the enterprise motion for two years. They signed three of the top 10 brands and missed plan in 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 pivot that finally worked was the opposite. Pull a 5,000-record territory file of independents in three states, route it to four AEs, hit the owner directly 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.
Who buys this data
B2B vendors selling into 565,196 shops.
Seven buyer profiles, ranked by how often they actually pay for this file.
Shop management software
Tekmetric, Mitchell 1, Shop-Ware, AutoLeap, RepairShopr. Cloud shop management replacing the 15-year-old desktop systems. The buyer is the owner of a one-to-eight-bay independent.
Parts distribution
NAPA, AutoZone Commercial, O'Reilly First Call, Advance Professional. Route reps placing parts programs. The conversation is with the owner who signs the supply contract, not the tech who pulls the parts.
Diagnostic equipment
Snap-on, Mac Tools, Matco. Scan tools, lifts, alignment racks. Tool truck reps need names and bay counts before they walk in.
Shop financing and capital
Working capital lenders, equipment finance, acquisition lending for owners buying a second or third shop. The market is built for it: 432,800 single-shop operators is a refinance and expansion pipeline.
Payment processing and integrated payments
CarMD, Bolt On Technology, integrated card-present processors aimed at the shop floor. Tied to whichever shop management system is on the counter.
Marketing and SEO
RepairPal certification, AutoVitals, Demandforce, local-SEO agencies running paid plus organic for independent shops. The market is local, the buyer is the owner, and the budget is monthly.
Training and certification
ASE certification, OEM training programs, technician recruiting platforms. They sell to the shop owner who has to hire and retain techs in a labour market that has been short for fifteen years.
Same data shape, different verticals: the how-many auto-repair shops sister page, the broader data insights index, and the full by-industry email lists.
Plain-spoken
When the auto-service dataset is the wrong fit.
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. You need two procurement contacts, not 565,196 records. Save your budget.
Your sales motion only fires above 50 locations per logo. If your sales cycle is built for 9 months and a procurement RFP, you want the top 30 brands, not the 432,800 single-shop independents. We can pull the chain-grain file, but the independents are not your buyer.
You sell auto-parts retail to consumers. Drivers buying their own tires, wipers, or batteries: this is operator-side data, not consumer-side. That is a consumer dataset, not an operator dataset.
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.
The honest version
Why most auto-repair vendor data is wrong.
If you Google "how many auto repair shops in the US," the top results are usually IBISWorld citing around 280,000, or the Auto Care Association citing 234,000 service outlets in their factbook, or Census NAICS 8111 sitting near 165,000. All three are right inside their definition. IBIS counts oil-change and tire. Auto Care counts service outlets. Census counts NAICS 8111. 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 the shop 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, so an independent four-bay shop with no website 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, body, glass, car wash, detail, towing, transmission. Plus bay count, brand affiliation, and shop management system in use where we can verify it.
One more piece of context worth pricing in. IBISWorld, Auto Care, and the chain-level industry reports are excellent inside their definitions, and we cite them. They are also annual or semi-annual. For a vendor doing outbound this quarter, the question is which 432,800 independent shops are open this Monday and which owner is on 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?
565,196, when you count the full Orbital Auto Shops and Services market: mechanical repair, oil change, tire, body and collision, glass, car wash, detail, towing, and transmission. The narrower NAICS 8111 figure for pure mechanical-repair shops is around 165,000. Both are correct, they just answer different questions.
What is the difference between Orbital's 565k and Census's 165k?
Census NAICS 8111 covers only automotive repair, mostly mechanical, body, and glass. The Orbital figure rolls in tire retail with installation, oil-change-only quick-lube, car wash, detail, and towing because vendors selling into the shop floor often sell across those sub-categories. If you are pricing a market for pure-play mechanical brake-and-engine repair, use 165,000. If you sell shop management software, payment, or marketing services, the 565,196 universe 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.
Is Walmart Auto Care really a 'chain'?
Technically yes, in practice 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 PandL, and most B2B vendors selling shop software or marketing services exclude Walmart from their addressable market because the buying process is corporate procurement, not the local shop owner. 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 (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, car wash, detail, towing, or transmission. So if you only sell collision DRP software, you can pull the 22,000 or so body shops without paying for the 432,800 mechanical and tire independents you do not want.
How concentrated is the market?
Not very. The 10 largest chains by storefront hold roughly 2.7 percent of the 565,196 US auto-service universe, after stripping out the misclassified Circle K rows and footnoting Take 5 Car Wash. 76.6 percent of US auto-service locations 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 565,196 records. 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 you can check against your own pipeline, no commitment, no email-list back-and-forth.
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