The People Who Keep Britain Moving

Rather more than half a million people in Britain go to work each morning on other people’s cars. The Institute of the Motor Industry counts 618,035 of them in automotive retail, meaning the franchised dealerships, the independent garages, the parts counters and the leasing desks, with a further 141,923 in manufacturing and 106,301 doing automotive work inside other industries, from police fleets to council depots. Added together, the IMI’s Landscape of the UK Automotive Labour Market, published in September 2024, arrives at 866,259.

The figure usually quoted is 760,000, which is retail and manufacturing alone and about 2.3% of all UK jobs. Either count describes a workforce roughly the size of Sheffield and Bradford together, spread across 100,641 establishments and generating £37.05 billion in gross value added in 2023. The largest single block of it, 269,416 people working across 52,144 premises, does nothing but maintain and repair vehicles.

Service, maintenance, testing and repair 35.2%

Sales and marketing 16.5%

Operational 14.6%

Logistics, delivery and storage 9.4%

Manufacturing 7.2%

Managers and leaders 6.4%

Data and IT 2.6%

Remaining categories: driving 1.8%, training and education 0.7%, remanufacturing and end-of-life 0.5%.

Source: Institute of the Motor Industry, 2025

The Shape Of The Trade

The IMI’s workforce report Driving the Future, issued in October 2025, sorts the sector by what people do rather than by who employs them. Service, maintenance, testing and repair is 35.2% of it. Sales and marketing takes 16.5%, operational roles 14.6%, logistics and storage 9.4%. Managers and leaders are 6.4%. Data and IT, the part everyone assumes is growing fastest, is 2.6%. Training and education, the people who teach the next intake, are 0.7% of the whole.

Older Than The Country It Serves

More than 47% of the automotive workforce is aged 45 or over, the IMI reported in October 2025, and fewer under-25s are arriving than are needed to replace those leaving. The 2024 baseline data puts a fifth of the entire sector over 55: 20% in retail, 19% in manufacturing. In maintenance and repair, the biggest employer of the lot, 15% of staff sit in the 55 to 64 band and another 4% are past 65.

Vacancies say the same thing from the other end. The IMI counted roughly 17,000 unfilled roles across the motor trades on a vacancy rate of 2.8%, and noted that by 2024 the motor trades had the second highest average vacancy rate of any sector, tying with hospitality for the top spot for three months running. Turnover, though, is unremarkable. Some 10.1% of automotive employees changed employer during 2024, against 10.0% outside the sector, a difference the IMI’s own statistical testing calls insignificant. People are not leaving the trade in unusual numbers. They are simply ageing, and too few are arriving.

With the number of vehicles on UK roads rising, and the number of technicians training to repair and maintain them falling, UK motorists face an increasing risk of being unable to find someone qualified to properly look after their car.

What The Job Pays

Occupation	Median
All UK full-time employees	£39,039
Vehicle technicians, mechanics and electricians	£37,458
Vehicle body builders and repairers	£34,999
Vehicle paint technicians	£34,531
Vehicle and parts salespersons and advisers	£31,851
Tyre, exhaust and windscreen fitters	£30,500
Vehicle valeters and cleaners	£26,598

Source: ONS, Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings 2025 (provisional)

Those come from the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, provisional 2025 edition, published on 23 October 2025 and measuring the pay period in April 2025. A full-time vehicle technician, mechanic or electrician took a median £37,458, up 5.5% on the year. That is decent growth, and it still leaves the job £1,581 short of the £39,039 median for all full-time UK employees. The spread matters more than the midpoint: the bottom tenth of technicians were on £24,685 or less, a quarter of the trade earned £30,000 or under, and the top tenth cleared £52,670.

Further down the ticket the arithmetic gets harder. Tyre, exhaust and windscreen fitters had a median of £30,500 and valeters £26,598. Women working full-time as vehicle technicians recorded a median of £31,318, though the ONS suppressed the job count for that group as too small to publish, which is itself a finding.

Nineteen Per Cent, And Eleven

Women were 18.6% of the automotive workforce in the year to September 2024, against 50.8% across non-automotive industries and 52.7% of the working-age population. They held 10.4% of senior roles, a share the IMI says has declined over the past three years. In vehicle maintenance and repair, the technician end of the trade, the figure is 11.3%, the lowest of any automotive subsector. Car and light vehicle sales runs at 24.5%. Renting and leasing, at 53.3%, is majority female.

Ethnicity reads differently. Non-White-British employees made up 19.9% of the sector, close to the 20.8% recorded across other industries, and the IMI identifies this as the area of clearest progress. Representation in leadership is 11.6%. Manufacturing is the most ethnically diverse part of the trade at 26.3%; maintenance and repair the least, at 9.1%. The average age of a non-White-British automotive employee is 39.6 against 46.4 for White British colleagues, which makes the promotion gap a forecast as well as a fact. Disabled employees account for 16.2% of the workforce and 9.8% of senior roles, and average nearly 49 years of age.

The industry has not hidden from any of this. The IMI’s Diversity Task Force, a year-long exercise reported in March 2022 under IMI President Professor Jim Saker and chief operating officer Lesley Woolley, examined race and ethnicity, physical and non-visible disability, and gender and sexual orientation. It asked employers to do five things: put diversity and inclusion on every board and senior leadership agenda; understand their own staff through better data; make the small adaptations that cost little and change much; review decisions through a new lens; and change perceptions of the sector. The 2025 report adds the There’s More to Motor campaign, national skills competitions with WorldSkills UK, and a request that government reform the apprenticeship and Growth and Skills levy and recognise the IMI’s TechSafe competence standards in the national skills system.

All the Task Force working groups said that culture needs to change, behaviours need to change.

Starts, And Finishes

Measure	2023/24	2024/25
Starts	339,580	353,500
Participation	736,530	761,480
Achievements	178,220	198,330

Source: Department for Education, 2025

England recorded 353,500 apprenticeship starts and 198,330 achievements in 2024/25, the Department for Education reported on 27 November 2025. The two figures count different cohorts, so the gap between them is not a dropout rate. The trend underneath it is real enough: the overall achievement rate rose 5.9 percentage points between 2022/23 and 2023/24, driven almost entirely by retention, up 5.7 points, rather than by pass rates, up 0.4.

Automotive is moving the other way. The IMI reported in May 2025 that automotive apprenticeship starts in the first half of 2024/25 were 3% down year on year and 12% below 2018/19, an average shortfall of 790 starts a year since before the pandemic. Autocare technician starts fell 10%, light vehicle service and maintenance 2%, vehicle damage MET 36% and accident repair 23%. Heavy vehicle work and automotive glazing rose, by 11% and 18%. Automotive qualification certifications fell 4% in the final quarter of 2024 while vocational certifications across all industries rose 6%.

Two structural details explain much of it. Sixty-four per cent of automotive apprenticeship starts are made by under-19s, against 28% across all apprenticeships: the trade recruits school leavers or it does not recruit. And only 51% of those starts were levy-funded, against 65% of apprenticeships generally, because the employers doing the training are small. The light vehicle service and maintenance technician standard sits at level 3, runs a typical 36 months and carries a maximum funding band of £16,000. For a four-bay garage that is a serious undertaking, repeated for every technician it hopes to keep.

Certified, Or Not

Some 74,734 technicians, 35% of the technician workforce, held an electric vehicle qualification at the end of 2025 on IMI figures published in June 2026. New certifications in that final quarter numbered 2,792, up 6% on the previous quarter but 17% below the same quarter of 2024. The IMI’s projection, and it is a projection, reaches roughly 137,000 EV-qualified technicians by 2032 and 193,000 by 2035, with demand overtaking supply in 2033 and a gap of more than 43,000 by 2035.

Unless this qualification trajectory changes dramatically, there will be a dangerous skills shortfall in just five years.

The Weather In The Workshop

Ben, the automotive industry charity, has surveyed the trade’s health and wellbeing annually for eight waves now. The latest, fielded between November 2024 and January 2025 and published that May, drew 1,159 responses. Automotive workers reported worse outcomes than the wider UK workforce on every one of the top issues: anxiety 44% against 30%, workplace stress 41% against 27%, poor work-life balance 38% against 22%. Among garage staff specifically, poor sleep affected 56%, up eleven points on the year; workplace stress 51%, up twelve; poor work-life balance 46%, also up twelve. Ben attributes the rise to workloads growing in both volume and complexity. Seventeen per cent of garage workers reported breathing in fumes.

Nearly a quarter of the whole sample were considering leaving the industry within twelve months, and of those, 49% gave mental health as a reason. One in six had skipped meals in the previous year. One in five had struggled with debt.

At the roadside the numbers run to a different scale. The AA fielded 2,753 patrols in its 2026 financial year, seven fewer than the year before, and attended 3.5 million breakdowns. That is about 1,270 jobs per patrol per year, or five on a working day, in weather that is not negotiable and on verges that are.

The trade is not short of work, or of margin, or of technology. It is short of people who will still be turning a spanner in 2040, which is the year the IMI’s own baseline report expects apprenticeship numbers to have recovered from the 18,000 places lost to the pandemic. On the sector’s recruitment arithmetic, whoever is doing the job then is already at school.