How Many Car Dealerships Are in the US? (2026 Data)

There are 16,990 franchised light-vehicle dealerships in the United States, according to NADA’s 2025 Full-Year Report, the most authoritative and widely-cited source for this number. That’s the best single answer to “how many new-car dealerships are in the US?”

But if you’ve done any research on this question, you’ve probably seen numbers ranging from 17,000 all the way up to 117,000. None of them are wrong. They’re just counting different things. Franchised dealers, rooftops, franchise points, active independents, and licensed locations are four separate categories that get conflated constantly, which is why you see such a wide spread across sources.

Here’s the clean breakdown of all five numbers, and what each one actually counts.

The most defensible answer for 2026 is this: the U.S. has 16,990 franchised new-car dealerships, plus roughly 52,000 active independent used-car dealers, putting the practical active dealer universe somewhere around 69,000 operators. That combined number is a market-sizing estimate rather than an official statistic, because the two categories come from different sources using different definitions. But it’s the most useful working number for understanding the full scope of U.S. auto retail.

NADA publishes this data through its annual industry report, which is the industry’s primary data source for franchised dealer counts and per-store economic metrics.

Why Dealership Counts Vary: 16,990 vs. 117,000 Explained

Most of the confusion around U.S. dealership counts comes from four distinct units that often get lumped together. Once you understand what each one counts, the numbers stop contradicting each other and start making sense.

A franchised light-vehicle dealer is what most people mean when they say “car dealership.” These are the stores authorized by an automaker to sell new vehicles. The NADA count of 16,990 captures exactly this universe as of calendar year 2025. That number covers every Toyota store, every Ford dealer, every Chevrolet rooftop across all 50 states and Washington D.C. It doesn’t include independent used-car lots, and it doesn’t count franchise points separately. It covers only the physical, authorized new-car dealership locations. When people in the auto industry ask “how big is the franchised dealer market,” this is the number they mean.

A dealership rooftop is a physical retail location. Urban Science’s 2025 Automotive Franchise Activity Report counted 18,398 dealerships using its own methodology, close to NADA’s number but not identical. Urban Science and NADA use different definitions and different data collection approaches, which accounts for most of the gap. Urban Science’s count is particularly valuable for franchise-network analysis and rooftop-level geographic modeling, especially when tracking how OEM dealer networks evolve over time.

A franchise point is a brand authorization, not a physical store. A single dealership building can hold multiple brand franchises: one store might sell Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, and Ram under one roof while showing up as four franchise points in OEM network data. Urban Science counted 29,708 franchise points in 2025, down from 30,124 in 2024. That’s why you can see a rooftop count of 18,398 and a franchise count of 29,708 in the same report, because each store can hold multiple brands. Any time an OEM announces it’s “expanding its dealer network,” it’s often growing franchise points within existing rooftops rather than opening net-new physical locations.

An independent used-car dealer is an entirely separate category. These dealerships sell used vehicles without a new-car franchise agreement. The universe of independent dealers ranges from large, high-volume used-car retailers down to small specialty operators and license holders who do minimal volume. NIADA’s analysis distinguishes between licensed dealer locations (around 117,000) and “active” dealers actually moving inventory at meaningful volume (around 52,000 to 53,000), and that distinction matters enormously for any real market sizing exercise. The licensing threshold for becoming a dealer is relatively low in most states, which inflates the license count well beyond the number of operators actually running retail businesses.

The takeaway: when you see a dealership count, the first question to ask is always “which category is this counting?” The answer changes everything. A number without a definition is close to useless for market analysis.

Car Dealerships by State: 2026 Complete Breakdown

The national total of 16,990 franchised new-car dealerships is distributed unevenly across all 50 states, shaped by population, geography, and each state’s auto retail history. NADA’s 2025 Full-Year Report provides a complete state-by-state breakdown.

Which States Have the Most Car Dealerships?

California, Texas, and Florida alone account for 3,572 franchised new-car dealerships, roughly 21% of the national total. For automotive vendors, dealer groups, and regional operators, that concentration matters: if you’re trying to reach a large share of the franchised new-car dealer market, those three states are where a meaningful portion of it lives.

Which States Have the Fewest Car Dealerships?

A small rooftop count doesn’t necessarily mean weak economics. In geographically spread-out states like Montana, Wyoming, and Alaska, a single dealership can serve a trade area covering hundreds of square miles. Those stores often see service volume that would surprise anyone who looked only at the state’s total dealership count. For rural markets, the per-store opportunity can be substantial precisely because there’s so little competition nearby.

What the state tables can’t tell you is what’s happening inside each of those stores on any given Monday morning. The relevant question for vendors, investors, and anyone thinking seriously about the dealership market isn’t just “how many rooftops are in this state?” It’s “how much service demand, sales volume, and phone traffic does each rooftop handle?” That question points toward the economic data, which paints a very different picture of this market.

How Much Revenue Does the Average Car Dealership Make?

The number that tends to surprise people isn’t the rooftop count. It’s what each of those 16,990 rooftops produces economically.

According to NADA’s 2025 Full-Year Report, U.S. franchised dealerships collectively generated over $1.3 trillion in total sales, sold 16.2 million light-duty vehicles, and wrote more than 276 million repair orders. Service and parts sales exceeded $164 billion. When you divide those national totals across 16,990 stores, you get a picture of what the average franchised dealership looks like:

The per-store repair order figure is calculated from NADA’s national totals: 276 million repair orders across 16,990 dealers. That comes to roughly 310 repair orders per week at the average store, or about 310 repair orders per week.

At 310 repair orders a week, a franchised dealership is running a high-volume service operation that generates demand every single day. Most people think of a dealership as a place you visit once every few years to buy a car. The data tells a different story. It’s closer to a mid-sized medical clinic in terms of appointment volume and scheduling complexity. Not a quiet retail storefront.

And the vast majority of those 310 weekly appointments start the same way: a customer picks up the phone. Not a form submission, not a digital booking portal (though those exist), not a walk-in. Customers call. They call to book oil changes, ask about recall status, inquire about availability on a specific vehicle, reschedule a service visit, check on a car that’s in the shop. Each of those calls is an opportunity that either results in a booked appointment or doesn’t. Across a $76.6 million per-year operation, the difference between those two outcomes adds up fast.

How Car Dealerships Make Their Money: Revenue Breakdown

NADA’s 2025 data breaks down the revenue mix across dealership departments:

Service and parts generating 13.3% of total revenue can look modest compared to the vehicle sales side. But fixed operations (the service department, parts counter, and body shop) occupy a uniquely strategic position in dealership economics. Unlike vehicle sales, which are one-time transactions, service is recurring. Customers come back for oil changes, tire rotations, recalls, and scheduled maintenance year after year. Those recurring visits drive customer retention, CSI scores, and long-term dealership profitability in ways that a single vehicle sale can’t replicate.

That $164 billion in national service and parts revenue comes from one channel almost exclusively: customers calling to schedule appointments. Which means every missed call, every abandoned hold, and every unanswered after-hours voicemail isn’t just a customer experience problem. It’s a fixed ops revenue problem.

The average franchised dealership writing ~$9.7 million in service and parts annually can lose a meaningful fraction of that to operational gaps in call handling. How much depends on the store, but it’s not a rounding error.

Are Car Dealerships Growing or Declining in 2026?

The short answer: relatively stable on rooftops, shrinking on franchise points.

Urban Science’s 2025 Automotive Franchise Activity Report counted 18,398 dealerships at year-end 2025, up from 18,374 at year-end 2024. That’s an increase of just 24 rooftops across the entire national market, which is essentially flat. At the same time, the number of franchise points fell from 30,124 to 29,708, a decline of 416 points. That divergence tells an interesting story: the physical footprint of dealership retail is holding steady, while OEM networks are consolidating. Dealers aren’t closing; they’re losing individual brand authorizations, often as part of brand portfolio shifts, group restructuring, or OEM strategy changes.

For context, the franchise decline of 416 points in a single year represents roughly 1.4% of the total brand-authorization network. That’s not a crisis, but it’s also not nothing. For the brands shedding points and the affected dealers who need to reconfigure their operations, those numbers have real operational implications. Most of those changes happen quietly, without the drama of a full dealership closure.

Urban Science also reported average dealership throughput of 889 vehicle sales per dealership in 2025, with a projected 877 for 2026. That slight expected dip aligns with the broader sales environment. NADA’s early 2026 market data shows new light-vehicle sales at a seasonally adjusted annual rate (SAAR) of 16.3 million units in March 2026, but Q1 2026 came in at a 15.7 million SAAR overall, down 5.2% from Q1 2025. (A SAAR, or seasonally adjusted annual rate, is an annualized pace that strips out seasonal variation, giving a consistent monthly benchmark for tracking sales momentum.)

So the current picture is: dealer counts are stable, sales volume is slightly down, and the franchise network is contracting around the edges. What’s changing fastest isn’t the count itself. It’s what happens inside each store as EV inventory mix shifts, financing conditions evolve, digital retail expectations grow, and competition for the service dollar intensifies.

How Many Used-Car Dealerships Are in the US?

The used-car dealer landscape doesn’t have a single clean number, and that’s by design of how the market is structured. Independent used-car dealers range from large, high-volume retailers to small specialty lots and license holders who rarely do meaningful volume. Any count has to specify what it’s actually counting.

NIADA’s 2025 Used Car Industry Report separates licensed dealer locations from “active” dealers actually moving vehicles at meaningful volume. That distinction matters because the license count and the active-operator count are very different numbers:

NIADA’s 2025 Used Car Industry Report puts the active count at 51,965 based on a threshold of roughly five or more vehicle sales per month. Blue & Co.'s summary of the same underlying data describes approximately 53,000 active dealers using a different threshold: at least 50 vehicles sold annually. The difference in the two active counts reflects different ways of drawing that line.

On volume: NIADA reported that independent used-vehicle dealers sold 9.8 million vehicles in 2025, up from 9.7 million in 2024. Total used-vehicle sales across all channels reached approximately 38.6 million, up about 1.3 million from the prior year.

If you need one working number for the full active U.S. dealership market (franchised new-car dealers plus active independent used-car dealers), 69,000 is the most defensible estimate. But it should be labeled as an estimate derived from two separate data sources, not a formal industry statistic.

Why Do Different Sources Report Different Dealership Counts?

Five reasons, specifically.

-> New-car dealers are not the same as all dealerships. NADA’s 16,990 counts only franchised light-vehicle dealers. It says nothing about independent used-car operators. If someone quotes 16,990 and someone else quotes 117,000, they’re likely measuring entirely different things.

-> Rooftops are not the same as franchise points. One physical dealership can hold multiple OEM authorizations. A Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram store is one rooftop but four franchise points. Urban Science can report 18,398 dealerships and 29,708 franchises in the same report without any contradiction.

-> Licensed dealers are not the same as active dealers. NIADA makes this explicit: a license is easy to obtain, and many holders aren’t running active retail operations. Using the 117,000 licensed count as your market size overstates the real independent dealer universe by more than double compared to the active count.

-> Establishment datasets count businesses differently than industry reports count rooftops. Government datasets based on NAICS codes can be useful for employment and payroll analysis, but they often lag real-time industry counts and classify businesses in ways that don’t align with how NADA, Urban Science, or NIADA define their own categories.

-> Some sources count businesses; others count locations. A dealer group may be one business entity owning 30 rooftops. A single store may hold four franchises. Any count is only useful if you know the unit being measured.

Every number you’ll see is technically accurate in its own frame. The problem is when those frames get mixed without explanation.

How to Use U.S. Dealership Count Data for Market Sizing

For vendors, investors, and founders trying to calculate a total addressable market for dealership-facing products, the 117,000 licensed dealer count is almost never the right starting point. Most dealership software, AI platforms, CRM tools, DMS products, and fixed ops solutions serve specific segments of the market, not the full licensed universe.

Here’s how the segments break out for practical TAM planning:

One additional ownership data point worth noting: according to NADA’s 2025 data, 90.5% of franchised dealership owners operated one to five dealerships, while 9.5% operated six or more. The market remains predominantly composed of smaller operators by store count, even though the largest dealer groups get the most press. That ownership structure matters for sales strategy. Most buyers are still individual dealer principals or small group operators, not procurement teams at public dealer groups.

For the used-car segment specifically, the active independent market is large by count (~52,000) but more fragmented and variable in tech adoption compared to the franchised new-car dealer universe.

What 16,990 Car Dealerships Means for Operations and Revenue

The count by itself doesn’t tell the operational story. What tells the story is what happens inside each of those 16,990 locations on any given Monday morning.

A franchised dealership isn’t just a lot with cars on it. It’s a multi-department business running simultaneous workflows: sales teams qualifying and following up on leads, service advisors managing hundreds of open repair orders at any given time, BDC (Business Development Center) staff fielding inbound calls and handling outbound follow-up, parts departments coordinating inventory and fulfillment.

At the average store, that operational complexity generates $76.6 million in annual revenue across new vehicles, used vehicles, and fixed operations. Most dealers don’t think of themselves as running a $76 million business, but that’s what the data shows.

Almost every dollar of that revenue originates with a customer trying to reach the store. Sales leads call to ask about inventory, check financing options, and schedule test drives. Service customers call to book appointments, ask about recall status, confirm pickup times, and reschedule. Callers who tried the website first and couldn’t get a quick answer call the main number. And then there are the after-hours callers. Industry data consistently shows that 56-60% of dealership leads arrive outside of typical business hours, which means the majority of customer demand arrives when staffing is thinnest or nonexistent.

When those after-hours moments happen, many stores send callers to voicemail. And that has a predictable consequence:

Approximately 70% of people who hit dealership voicemail dial a competitor within 30 minutes. (source)

That’s not a customer experience problem in the abstract. That’s revenue walking out the door in real time. With an average of roughly 16,200 repair orders per store per year, even a modest improvement in call capture translates into thousands of additional booked appointments annually per location.

This is where the count becomes operationally meaningful. It’s not 16,990 quiet storefronts. It’s 16,990 high-volume communications engines, each running at a different speed, with a different call handling setup, and a different tolerance for how much revenue it’s comfortable losing to missed calls, voicemail, and abandoned holds. The question for any individual dealer isn’t “how many stores are there?” It’s “what’s my store capturing versus what’s walking away?”

How Flai Closes the Revenue Gap in Dealership Call Handling

The 16,990 franchised new-car dealer universe is the market Flai was built for. Not because it’s the largest number on the list, but because it’s the segment where the operational problem is clearest and the revenue impact of solving it is highest.

Every data point in this post points toward the same underlying reality: franchised dealerships run on communication volume, most of that communication is phone-driven, and the existing infrastructure for handling that volume (human BDC staff, voicemail, after-hours call centers) has predictable gaps that cost real money. The average franchised store writes approximately 16,200 repair orders per year. It generates around $9.7 million in service and parts revenue. That volume doesn’t build itself. It comes from customers calling to schedule, confirm, reschedule, and follow up on service.

We built Flai to close the gap between the calls that come in and the appointments that actually get booked. Flai is an AI communications platform that answers every inbound call 24/7, handles service scheduling in real time by connecting directly to the dealership’s scheduler, pushes leads to the CRM, and manages the full communication flow from first contact through appointment confirmation, across voice, SMS, and email. It’s also not built on off-the-shelf voice AI components. We built our own voice infrastructure from the ground up to handle the specific vocabulary, pace, and edge cases of dealership conversations, which is why calls handled by Flai feel different from calls handled by generic voice automation.

The results from dealerships that have deployed Flai reflect how much revenue was sitting in unanswered calls:

• A Lexus dealership in the Bay Area used Flai to handle after-hours calls and peak overflow, capturing 376 booked appointments from 426 bookable calls (an 88% conversion rate) with zero missed calls and an estimated $100,000 monthly profit impact.
• A CDJR dealership in the same market saw monthly service appointments nearly double, from 205 to 448, with Flai handling 1,563 calls in that first month and booking 304 of them, adding approximately $83,000 in estimated monthly profit.
• A Toyota dealership running a similar deployment reported 1,053 calls handled, 358 appointments booked, and roughly $94,000 in monthly profit impact.

The Lexus case study page on Flai’s website documents the full methodology and results behind the first case study listed above.

The math behind those results isn’t complicated: each franchised dealership is worth an average of $76.6 million in total sales annually. Even a small improvement in call capture translates to meaningful revenue because the average appointment generates meaningful profit. At Flai, we’ve found that missed calls don’t represent small, scattered losses. They aggregate into five and six figures of monthly leakage at the average rooftop.

For dealers, fixed ops directors, and BDC managers working inside the 16,990-store universe, the dealership count isn’t the interesting number. The interesting number is what your store captures versus what it lets walk out the door. If you want to see what Flai does with a specific store’s call volume, you can explore how it works on our website or learn more in our AI BDC guide.

Frequently Asked Questions About U.S. Car Dealerships

How many new-car dealerships are in the US?

There are 16,990 franchised light-vehicle dealerships in the United States, according to NADA’s 2025 Full-Year Report. That’s the most authoritative number for franchised new-car dealerships as of the latest full-year data available in 2026. The count covers all automaker-authorized dealerships across all 50 states.

How many car dealership rooftops are in the US?

Urban Science’s 2025 Automotive Franchise Activity Report counted 18,398 dealerships as of year-end 2025, up from 18,374 in 2024. This is Urban Science’s rooftop-level count under its own methodology. It’s close to NADA’s number but not identical because the two organizations use different definitions and data sources.

How many automotive franchises are in the US?

Urban Science counted 29,708 automotive franchise points in 2025, down from 30,124 in 2024. A franchise point is a brand authorization, not necessarily a separate physical store. One dealership rooftop can hold multiple franchise points, which is why the franchise count is higher than the rooftop count.

How many used-car dealerships are in the US?

According to public summaries of NIADA’s 2025 Used Car Industry Report, there are approximately 117,000 licensed independent dealer locations and around 51,965 to 53,000 active independent used-car dealers. The active count is the more useful number for market sizing because license counts include many low-volume or inactive operators.

What state has the most car dealerships?

California has the most franchised new-car dealerships, with 1,334, followed by Texas (1,285) and Florida (953). Together, those three states account for about 21% of all franchised new-car dealerships in the country, according to NADA’s 2025 state-by-state data.

What state has the fewest car dealerships?

Alaska has the fewest franchised new-car dealerships, with 27, according to NADA’s 2025 data. Wyoming has 47, Rhode Island has 51, and Delaware has 53. Small counts don’t always mean weak economics. In spread-out states, each store can cover a very large trade area with surprisingly high call and service volume.

Are car dealerships declining?

Rooftop counts are essentially flat. Urban Science reported 18,398 dealerships at year-end 2025, up slightly from 18,374 in 2024, an increase of just 24 locations nationally. OEM brand networks are contracting even as physical locations hold steady, though. The number of automotive franchise points declined from 30,124 to 29,708 over the same period, showing that brand authorizations are consolidating within existing rooftops.

Why do NADA and Urban Science report different dealership counts?

NADA counts franchised light-vehicle dealers (16,990). Urban Science counts dealership sites using its own Automotive Franchise Activity Report methodology (18,398). The two organizations define their counting units differently and collect data independently, which accounts for the gap. Neither number is wrong. They’re measuring related but distinct things.

What is the total active dealership market in the US?

A practical estimate is approximately 69,000 active dealers or dealer operators, combining 16,990 franchised new-car dealers with roughly 51,965 active independent used-car dealers. This is a market-sizing estimate, not an official industry statistic, because the two categories come from different sources with different methodologies. It’s the most defensible working number for total active U.S. auto retail when evaluating software, AI platforms, and dealership-facing products.

How many repair orders does the average franchised dealership write per year?

Approximately 16,200 repair orders per year, derived from NADA’s reported national total of more than 276 million repair orders across 16,990 franchised dealerships. That works out to roughly 310 repair orders per week at the average store, a high-volume service operation that depends heavily on consistent call handling to keep the schedule full, and where every missed appointment opportunity represents measurable revenue left on the table.