How many car owners still service at the dealer?
What Cox Automotive's 2025 service study and NADA's 2025 figures say about who comes back to the dealer for service, with the date and source of each number.
By Armen Suny · Updated
The short answer
Cox Automotive's 2025 Service Industry Study, released on November 11, 2025, found that dealerships have lost 12% of service visits to competition since 2018. By Cox's count, dealers handled 29% of service visits in 2025 against 33% in 2018. Among dealership service visits for cars under two years old, 54% went to the dealership that sold the car in 2025, down from 72% in 2023. NADA's figures show franchised dealerships writing more than 276 million repair orders in 2025.
What did Cox Automotive's 2025 service study find?
Cox surveyed 1,974 vehicle owners aged 18 to 75 between April 16 and May 8, 2025, all of whom had serviced a vehicle in the previous 12 months. The headline numbers are in a press release dated November 11, 2025, and the detail is in the study's slides. A few slides draw on other sources, which Cox names on each one. The count of vehicles on the road, for one, comes from Hedges & Company.
| What Cox measured | 2025 | Compared with | Where Cox says it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dealer share of all service visits | 29% | 33% in 2018 | Slides |
| Vehicles in operation (Hedges & Company's count) | 298.7 million | 279.1 million in 2018 | Slides |
| Dealer share of service visits for vehicles under two years old | 55% | 68% in 2018 | Slides |
| Dealership service visits for vehicles under two years old made at the dealership that sold the car | 54% | 72% in 2023, 68% in 2018 | Slides and press release |
| Owners likely to buy from the dealership again | 74% of those who returned to the dealer for service in the past 12 months | 44% of those who didn't | Slides |
| Average spend | $261 at a dealership | $275 at a general repair shop | Slides and press release |
| Had a frustration at the dealership | 45% | Slides and press release | |
| A service provider shared a trade-in value with them during a service visit | 14% | 33% are highly interested in getting one | Slides |
Is the 12% a fall in visits or in share?
Quote it as a fall in share. Cox's slides put the dealer share of service visits at 33% in 2018 and 29% in 2025, labelled “-12% vs. 2018”. That works out to four percentage points, or 12% of the share dealers had in 2018. The press release words it as “Dealerships handle 12% fewer service visits than they did in 2018,” and says the overall number of service visits rose. The slides give no total for visits. They do show the number of vehicles in operation growing from 279.1 million in 2018 to 298.7 million in 2025, a count Cox credits to Hedges & Company.
Which customers are dealers losing?
Cox's slides say the dealer decline “is greatest among vehicles 5 years old or less.” For cars under two years old, the dealer share of service visits went from 68% in 2018 to 55% in 2025. Cars two to five years old dropped from 58% to 45%, and older cars held at 24%.
Another slide looks only at visits made to a dealership. For cars under two years old, 54% of those visits in 2025 were at the dealership that sold the car, against 72% in 2023 and 68% in 2018. The press release describes the 54% as the share of people with cars “two years old or newer” who “went back to the dealership where they purchased for service”. Asked why they didn't return to the dealership of purchase, owners put an inconvenient location first, followed by the worry that the dealer would overcharge them.
Keep the 55% and the 54% apart when you use them. The 55% covers every service visit those cars made, at any kind of shop, while Cox built the 54% from dealership visits alone and asked whether each one was at the store that sold the car.
Do service customers buy their next car from the same dealer?
Owners who come back for service say so more often. On Cox's slides, 74% of owners who had returned to the dealer for service in the past 12 months said they were likely to buy from that dealer again, against 44% of those who hadn't. These are answers about what people expected to do, given at the time of the survey.
The study also asked about trade-ins. Just 14% said a service provider had shared a trade-in value with them during a service visit, and 33% said they were highly interested in getting one.
Is dealer service more expensive than an independent shop?
In Cox's survey the average spend was $261 at a dealership and $275 at a general repair shop. Cox's slides also show that 45% had a frustration at the dealership. Among them, the most common was service taking longer than expected, named by 24%. Finding out how much the dealer charges and being pushed toward extra services came next at 13% each, and 12% said the final price was higher than the estimate. The press release sums up the main frustrations as unexpected costs and poor communication.
How much service work do dealerships do?
NADA's figures for 2025 cover the 16,990 franchised light-vehicle dealers in the US. Between them they wrote more than 276 million repair orders, and their service and parts sales came to more than $164 billion. NADA's full-year 2025 report has the exact totals: 276,128,228 repair orders and $164,598,127,462 in service and parts sales.
What do these numbers mean for a service department?
Cox titles this part of its study “Buy Here, Service There: Convenience Trumps Loyalty.” For cars under two years old, 46% of the dealership service visits in 2025 went to a dealer other than the one that sold the car. The dealership that made each of those sales already has the owner's details from it. Our guide to getting customers to come back for service turns this into steps for a service manager.
Common questions
What percentage of car owners go back to the dealer for service?
Cox puts the dealer share of all service visits at 29% in 2025. For cars under two years old the dealer share was 55%, and 54% of the dealership visits those cars made were to the dealership that sold them, according to the slides.
Where does the “12% of service visits” figure come from?
It's the headline of Cox Automotive's press release of November 11, 2025. The slides show it as the dealer share of service visits moving from 33% in 2018 to 29% in 2025.
How many repair orders do US dealerships write in a year?
NADA counts more than 276 million for 2025, across 16,990 franchised light-vehicle dealers.
Why are some well-known statistics missing from this page?
We kept to numbers we could find in Cox's and NADA's own publications. Figures that only turn up on blogs and vendor sites were left out, and each number above links to the document it came from.