Are tyres still worth fitting for a UK garage in 2026?

Ask ten workshop owners whether tyres are worth doing and you will get ten confident answers in both directions. The disagreement is real, and it comes from measuring the wrong thing. Almost everyone measures profit per tyre. The number that decides it is profit per hour of bay time, and once you look at that, the answer stops being a matter of opinion.

Trade figures below are 2025 to 2026 ranges for a common mid-range fitment. Your own factor pricing will differ, so run your numbers rather than mine.

Where the money went

Tyres are the most price transparent product a garage sells. The customer can stand in your reception and read the online price for the exact tyre you are quoting, delivered to their door, fitted at a mobile appointment. No other line on your invoice works like that. Nobody price checks a wheel bearing on their phone.

That transparency compresses the margin to something close to the difference between your buying price and the best published price, and yours is not the best published price.

The numbers on a supplied tyre

A common mid-range 205/55 R16, as an indicative example:

• Trade cost: £42 to £58
• Common online price fitted: £60 to £80
• What you can realistically charge: £65 to £85

Then take off what the job actually consumes:

• Valve: £1 to £2, or a TPMS service kit at £5 to £15
• Weights: £0.50 to £1.50
• Disposal: £1 to £3 per casing
• Balancing and fitting time: 15 to 25 minutes a corner

Gross profit lands at roughly £8 to £20 a tyre. Plus stock risk, because the sizes you hold are the ones nobody asks for and the size they want is the one you have to order.

The number that actually decides it

Convert it to bay time.

gross profit per tyre x tyres per hour = gross profit per bay hour

Four tyres an hour at £15 gross each gives £60 an hour. Now compare that with your labour rate. Most UK independents are somewhere between £55 and £80 outside London, which we broke down by region in what a UK garage should charge per hour.

So at best tyres are level with your labour rate, and that is with a clean run of four corners on one car with no seized bolts, no locking wheel nut hunt and nothing arriving late from the factor. On a single corner with a TPMS sensor to program, it is well below.

That is the honest answer to the question in the title: as a standalone profit line, tyres are marginal. They only make sense when they bring something else with them.

The fit-only model

More independents are moving to fit-only, where the customer buys the tyre wherever they like and you charge to fit it:

• Typical charge: £12 to £25 per tyre, more for run flats, low profile or TPMS work
• Stock risk: none
• Cash tied up: none
• Gross profit per bay hour: often better than on supplied tyres, because there is no trade cost to recover

It feels like a defeat to the owner who has always sold tyres. It usually is not. You are selling the one thing the online seller cannot deliver, which is a ramp, a technician and an appointment today.

What tyres are actually for

The real argument for tyres has never been the tyre. It is that the car is on your ramp.

A car in for two tyres is a car whose brakes, discs, suspension and tracking you can look at, with an owner who is already in a spending frame of mind and already thinking about safety. A quick documented check on the ramp, offered and not pushed, converts a £30 fitting job into the work that was going to get done somewhere eventually.

That only happens if the check is systematic. If it depends on whether the technician remembers, it happens on the good days and not on the busy ones. We covered how to run those properly in vehicle health checks for UK garages.

The other genuine value is the MOT connection. Tyres are one of the most common failure items at test, and a workshop that can fit on the spot converts a fail into a pass and a same day invoice instead of sending the customer down the road. What fails an MOT has the breakdown.

The hidden costs to price in

• Equipment: changer and balancer roughly £3,000 to £8,000, more for touchless machines that handle modern low profile and run flat fitments without damaging rims
• TPMS: a programming tool at £300 to £900, plus sensors and service kits
• Disposal: you must use a registered waste carrier and keep the paperwork, see the GOV.UK business waste guidance
• Damage risk: one kerbed alloy on a customer car wipes out the margin on a great many tyres
• Training: correct torque, correct seating, correct run flat handling, all covered by TyreSafe and worth doing properly given the consequences of getting it wrong

So, worth it or not

Worth it when: you already have the equipment, you fit on the same day, you use the ramp time to inspect, and you can turn MOT failures into immediate work.

Not worth it when: you are buying equipment specifically to compete on price with online sellers, or you are discounting tyres to win the customer and never selling them anything else.

The decision is measurable. Track gross profit per bay hour on tyre jobs for a month against gross profit per bay hour on everything else. If tyres are behind and they are not bringing other work with them, they are not a service, they are a hobby.

Where software helps

You cannot decide this on instinct, you need the two numbers side by side. Autera prices tyres and fitting as their own job types, keeps the vehicle health check attached to the car while it is on the ramp so the extra work is offered rather than remembered, and shows what each job type actually earns per hour so you can see whether tyres are pulling their weight in your workshop rather than in somebody else's. Try it free for 14 days or see a demo.