800 collision shops closed last year. Here's what that number actually means.

I've had a lot of shop owners call me lately asking for my read on one number. Roughly 800 collision shops closed in a single year, and it's getting repeated as proof the independent shop is finished. It's a scary headline, and it's a 2024 number. Let's look closer at what kind of number it actually is.

It's a Focus Advisors estimate for 2024, and it's often misdated as 2025. It counts closures of smaller, independent shops. A closure count and a measure of how much the industry shrank are two different things, and the difference is the whole story.

A closure count is not a shrinking industry

Start with the history, because it reframes everything. From 2006 to 2015, the US shop count fell from roughly 45,000 to about 33,000. That's a net loss of more than 1,300 shops a year, every year, for nearly a decade.

Now sit with the word net. A net decline already subtracts out the new shops that opened in those years. So the number that actually closed each year was higher than 1,300, because openings were quietly offsetting part of the losses. Whatever the gross closure count was back then, it ran well past 800, year after year.

Held against that, 800 closures in a year isn't a record. It's a quieter year than a decade a lot of you already worked through.

The number nobody puts on the scary slide

And the shrinking stopped a while ago. CollisionWeek, tracking the government establishment data, reported the independent collision shop population at its highest level since 2009 as of late 2023, after several years of growth. The count hasn't fallen off a cliff. It's held roughly stable, in the low-to-mid 30,000s, for about a decade.

Put the two facts together and the panic loses its footing. The big shakeout already happened, back in the 2000s. The last ten years have been flat to slightly up. A scary closure number reads very differently once you know shops have always closed, and fewer are closing now than in the years most of you survived.

What actually changed

The number of shops held up. What changed is the buyers, and what they're willing to pay for.

Set aside Gerber's acquisition of Joe Hudson's, which was one large operator buying another, and the big consolidators added only about 130 locations in 2025, against more than 450 the year before. At the same time, new private equity capital came into the space, and the targets moved down-market, toward operators with as few as one to three locations.

Buyers didn't leave the market. They got selective. The window is narrowing for shops that can't show their numbers and widening for the ones that can.

What "show your numbers" actually means

That phrase gets thrown around, so let me make it concrete. Whether a buyer is ever looking or not, three numbers decide which side of that window you're on.

Your break-even. The monthly revenue that covers every fixed cost before you make a dollar. If you can't say it within a few thousand dollars, you can't tell a good month from a lucky one, and neither can a buyer or a lender.

Your gross-profit mix. Not just total gross profit, but where it comes from: parts, labor, paint and materials, sublet. Two shops with the same top line can be worth very different money depending on where the margin lives and how steady it is.

What the business is actually worth. Not a multiple you heard at a 20-group, but your real adjusted earnings against what the structure can sustainably produce. The owners who know this number make calm decisions. The ones who don't either panic or coast.

Here's what ties it together. The shops that get bought and the shops that thrive without ever selling look identical on paper. They run the business off those three numbers. Buyer-ready and durable-independent are the same discipline. You build one thing, and it hands you every option.

The headline says one thing, the data says another

More than 32,000 independents are still standing, and plenty of them are profitable on fewer cars than they ran three years ago. The headline says the door is closing. For owners who run the business like it's worth something, the data says the opposite.

Know your numbers, build what's next.