How much does an open technician position actually cost my shop each month?

Industry research cited alongside this column estimates roughly $60,000 a month in lost revenue per vacancy. Treat it as an order of magnitude, not a line item. The bigger point holds: the cost isn't the unpaid salary, it's the high-margin work your remaining crew can't reach while covering the gap.

Does the 38% ADAS figure mean over a third of cars need calibration repairs right now?

No, and this is a common misread. The 38% is an adoption baseline for 2025 — how many vehicles on the road are equipped with ADAS, projected toward 71% by 2035. It is not a count of vehicles needing a calibration today. Equipped is not the same as in your bay for service.

Should I invest in EV and ADAS service capability this year because the forecasts are strong?

Invest at the pace you can certify, not the pace the chart wants. Only about 3% of technicians are EV-proficient and under 10% are battery-qualified, so the bottleneck is trained hands, not customer demand. Bring in electronic services when you have a tech and the tooling to do them without a comeback.

With the technician shortage, where should a short-handed shop focus to protect revenue?

On the aging combustion fleet already rolling in. The average vehicle is around 13 years old and needs brakes, suspension, filtration, cooling, and drivetrain work your existing techs do well. It's not in the press releases, but it's the real volume — and retaining the techs who do it beats chasing services you can't yet staff.

What's the lesson in Les Schwab cutting 70 HQ jobs while still adding stores?

They trimmed back-office overhead and kept investing in the customer-facing footprint, where the techs and trust live. With stores averaging about $3.5 million in yearly sales, the value sits at the counter and in the bay, not the org chart. Whatever you cut, don't cut the people doing the actual work.

Technician Shortage: Why a $60,000 Vacancy Beats a Slow Bay

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The last shop I trained at lost a brake-and-suspension tech in March and didn't backfill until July. The owner kept telling customers "we're a little short-staffed" like it was a weather delay. It wasn't. It was four months of an empty bay, deferred jobs walking next door, and the two remaining techs eating overtime until one of them started looking too. By the time he found a replacement, the math had stopped being about a payroll line and started being about whether the location still had a viable book of work.

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Technician Shortage: Why a $60,000 Vacancy Beats a Slow Bay