Heavy-duty repair shops are heading into 2025 with more work than ever. Fleets are keeping equipment longer, and the average vehicle age in the U.S. has climbed to about 12.8 years. Older assets mean more breakdowns, more inspections and more pressure on your bays and technicians.
Heavy-duty labor rates continue to rise across the industry. Data from the ATRI Operational Costs of Trucking Report and other public maintenance cost surveys show shop labor rates climbing from roughly 125 dollars to around 134 dollars per hour in recent years.
On paper, this should be a great time for independent and fleet-focused shops. In reality, many are not seeing that demand turn into profit. Industry data and ShopView’s analysis of profit leaks in heavy-duty shops show that a typical operation can leak 5,000 to 15,000 dollars per month through untracked labor, missed parts and slow invoicing.
Year-end is your best chance to see those leaks clearly and fix them before another year goes by. This guide focuses on three areas you can control:
Along the way, we will call out where tools like ShopView Scheduling and ShopView Inventory plug directly into these problems, so your review turns into an actionable plan instead of another “we should do better next year” conversation.
For most heavy-duty shops, demand is not the issue. Customer expectations and internal bottlenecks are.
Common patterns across the industry:
When a truck is down, fleets may be losing 450 to 760 dollars per day or more. They pass that urgency to you. The shops that win more business are the ones that:
Even trailer-only shops feel it. If a trailer cannot pass a basic safety or DOT-type inspection because of lighting, brakes or ABS issues, a fleet will not wait around. They will pick the shop that can turn it fast and reliably.
Year-end takeaway: You do not need more work. You need fewer bottlenecks in how that work moves through your shop.
Almost every heavy-duty shop owner will tell you the same thing keeps them up at night: technicians.
Wages have risen sharply and experienced diesel techs commonly earn 30 dollars per hour or more. Even so, many shops still run short-staffed. Dealers and big fleets can sometimes outbid independents, and not every shop offers strong benefits.
You cannot change the entire labor market, but you can make your shop one of the places good techs want to stay.
Top techs do not want to work in dark, cluttered or unsafe environments. Small improvements matter:
A professional, well kept shop makes recruiting easier and turnover lower.
Good technicians want to turn wrenches, not chase paper. When they are constantly filling out forms or standing at the counter, your utilization and morale both drop.
Digital work orders, inspections and photo capture give technicians a faster way to:
Many shops lose hours per day due to untracked labor, something examined in detail in ShopView’s guide to labor efficiency.
About a third of shops still do not have structured training, apprenticeships or clear advancement. That is a missed opportunity. Supporting things like ASE certifications, OEM courses and cross-training across systems sends a clear message: people can grow and build a career with you.
You may not be able to match every big-company benefit, but you can often offer:
In a market where good techs can leave any time, technician satisfaction is a business metric, not just a nice-to-have.
Many shops have full bays, strong demand and still struggle with profit. The problem is not one big issue. It is a set of small process failures that repeat every day.
Year-end is your best moment to slow down, look at the data and correct them.
The most common leaks:
Time is your most valuable asset. Across heavy-duty shops, it is common to lose around 1.5 hours per tech per day to:
At around 130 dollars per hour, that quickly becomes 5,000 dollars or more per technician per month.
A healthy benchmark is direct labor utilization, or how much of paid time becomes billed work. You want to see 65 to 75 percent. If you are closer to 50 percent, half of your payroll is going to non-productive time.
Year-end action: Pull the last few months of time tracking. If you cannot get a clear picture quickly, that itself is a sign you need digital time tracking and better reporting next year.
From a cash flow perspective, the job is not complete until the invoice is sent.
Many heavy-duty shops see 7 to 10 days between job completion and final invoice. That delay:
Top-performing shops work toward same-day or next-day invoicing. They do it by:
Year-end action: Calculate your average days from job completion to invoice for the last quarter. Set a specific target for next year, for example 0 to 2 days, and align your processes and tools to hit it.
Inventory is where quiet chaos likes to hide.
Common problems:
For many shops the issue is not parts availability, but not knowing what you really have and not billing what you use. Trailer shops are especially vulnerable because small parts like lights and wiring are easy to miss.
A strong year-end inventory review should include:
The target state is simple. Near 100 percent parts accountability.
Compliance is mandatory. Doing it manually is expensive.
Heavy-duty shops juggle inspections, DVIRs, emissions records, warranty documentation and PM schedules. If those live on paper, you are probably losing hours every week to:
When service managers spend more than 1 to 2 hours per day on paperwork, your processes are too manual. That is time not spent coaching techs, solving problems or increasing throughput.
Here is a quick summary of the core areas every heavy-duty shop should review at year-end and why each one matters.
If you want next year to look different, you need clear starting numbers. A simple KPI set can tell you where to focus:
If any of these numbers are far off, you have identified a profit leak worth working on in your 2025 plan.
Heavy-duty repair has historically lagged automotive on the technology front. That gap is closing fast. A modern, heavy-duty specific system can pull together:
Instead of separate spreadsheets, clipboards and whiteboards, you get a single source of truth. That is where platforms like ShopView Scheduling and ShopView Inventory come in, tying daily shop activity to the numbers you care about.
When you do your year-end review, think in terms of systems, not just problems. If techs are not tracking time, if parts are not being billed, if invoicing is slow, it is often because the process is hard to follow with the tools you have today.
The heavy-duty repair world in 2025 is high pressure and high opportunity. Demand is strong, trucks are older and more complex, and fleets are more demanding and data-driven.
The shops that thrive:
Many discover that once they tighten these systems, they effectively unlock six figures per year that were already there, just leaking out of the business unnoticed.
If you read this and know you are leaving money on the table, the next step is simple. Share your year-end numbers with your team and then Book a ShopView demo. We will walk through how much you could realistically recover next year by tightening inventory, cash flow and scheduling in one connected platform.