The Bay: Auto Repair Shop Effective Labor Rate & Break-Even Hours

The sign says $135 an hour. Your shop earns $79. Here's where the other $56 went — and the hours that get it back.

A shop earns the posted rate only on the hours a tech actually bills, minus the diag you gave away and the comebacks you ate, spread over every hour the tech was on the clock. That is the effective labor rate. The sample shop's is $78.98 — 58.5% of the sign — and most owners have never seen theirs.

The month, priced from the hours that bill. Labor, the parts that ride on every labor hour at your parts margin, techs paid on the clock, supplies, card fees, then rent, insurance, the advisor and your own pay. Profit and margin after all of it.

The hours the shop needs. Contribution per billed hour after everything that rides on it, and from that: break-even billed hours for the month and per tech per day, how far today's hours clear it, what one more billed hour a day is worth ($5,710 a month in the sample — the cheapest money in the shop), and the posted rate a target margin would need at today's hours.

Eight levels of work. The same techs, the same sign, the same rent, from 3.5 to 7.0 billed hours a day — profit, margin, effective rate and a Status on every row. Find your row, then look one row down: that is the slow month.

The dashboard grades it — effective rate against posted, tech efficiency, hours given away, bay utilization, hours against break-even, parts' share of gross profit, margin against your target, cash cushion in months of fixed cost — HEALTHY, WATCH or ALERT, with a chart. One portrait page.

Built for

Independent auto repair · tire and brake · transmission and diesel · motorcycle and powersports · small-engine and marine · anyone with bays, techs and a sign.

What you get

One .xlsx file, five tabs, instant download. Excel, Google Sheets, Apple Numbers, LibreOffice. No macros, no add-ins, no subscription. A realistic sample is loaded so you see every color of the grading before you type over it. Flat-rate shop? One line on the Start Here tab shows how to set it.