Auto Repair Shop Bay Capacity Planner

Work out how many repair orders your bays and technicians can realistically complete per day and per week, and whether lifts or people are the bottleneck.

Your estimate

Repair orders per week (ceiling)...

Repair orders per day...

Bay utilization...

Limiting resource...

Estimates only. Assumptions are listed below, and you can change every input.

Adding a fourth bay does not help if you only have two technicians, and hiring a fourth tech does not help if every lift is occupied by a car waiting for parts. Shops guess at how many cars they can take in each day, and the guess is usually optimistic because it ignores the hours a car sits on a lift without anyone turning a wrench.

The planner calculates two ceilings: productive technician hours (clock hours multiplied by your efficiency percentage) and available bay hours. The smaller of the two, divided by the average time a car occupies a bay, gives the number of repair orders your shop can realistically finish in a week. It also tells you which side is limiting you, so you know whether the next dollar should go to a lift, a hire or shorter waiting times.

How to use this tool

Enter how many working bays and technicians you have, plus your shop hours per day and days open per week.
Set the average time a car occupies a bay from lift-up to pickup ready, including waiting time, and your technicians' productive efficiency.
Read the weekly and daily repair order ceiling, the bay utilization, and which resource is limiting you.

What the math assumes

A bay is treated as available for every shop hour you enter, with no cleanup or changeover time between cars.
Technician efficiency is the share of clock hours spent producing billable work; the default of 80 percent is a placeholder, replace it with your own number.
Average bay time per repair order should include time the car sits waiting for parts or customer approval, since it still occupies the lift.
All technicians are treated as interchangeable; specialist work such as alignments or diagnostics is not modeled separately.
Weekly results are rounded down to whole repair orders.

Frequently asked questions

Why is my bay utilization below 100 percent?

Because your technicians run out of productive hours before your bays run out of time. The gap is capacity you could fill by adding a technician, extending hours, or cutting the time cars spend on a lift waiting for parts or approvals.

Should waiting time count in bay hours per repair order?

Yes. A car waiting two hours for an approval text still blocks the lift. Cutting that waiting time is often the cheapest way to add capacity without buying a lift or hiring anyone.

What if I have more technicians than bays?

The planner will show bays as the bottleneck. Technicians then share lifts, and real output depends on how well jobs are staggered, so treat the result as an upper limit rather than a forecast.

Link to this toolhttps://garagetrackr.com/tools/shop-bay-capacity-planner/

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