Amid sustained inflation, more high-tech vehicles in the market and tariff-induced uncertainty, aftermarket repair costs have steadily climbed over the past six years.

Vehicle repair costs are up 43% since 2019 to an average of up to $1,700 per visit, according to data provided to Auto Finance News by lender Synchrony Financial.

Three factors contributed to the rise, Keith Mait, automotive, oil and gas business leader for Synchrony, told AFN:

With longer ownership of vehicles, more repairs are inevitable, he said. While customers are willing to get emergency repairs, many aren’t willing to pay for preventative maintenance.

“Consumers are likely to opt in to the kinds of services that get them back on the road faster and safer,” he said. “They may not immediately agree to do the work that might be proactive.”

Synchrony’s Car Care Credit Card breaks those larger payments into smaller monthly installments, Mait said.

Tariffs to worsen expenses

In a June survey of 1,000 Synchrony’s card holders, just half said they could afford an unexpected expense of $1,000, Mait said.

“The primary word that keeps getting used is ‘anxiety,’” he said. “Consumers are anxious about not necessarily knowing how this is all going to play out.”

The rise in consumer uncertainty comes amid broader inflation and tariff-induced concerns, Mait said. Because parts for repairs are sourced globally, tariffs could “have a major influence on the cost.”

“[Consumers] need to maintain a proactive mindset toward vehicle health,” he said. “If they’re not under warranty anymore, they need to be mindful of the expenses that are coming their way.”

Tune in to “Weekly Wrap” to hear Mait’s conversation with AFN Associate Editor Aidan Bush.

Subscribe to “The Roadmap Podcast” on iTunes or Spotify or download the episode.

This episode is sponsored by The Work Number by Equifax.

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Editor’s note: This transcript has been generated by software and is being presented as is. Some transcription errors may remain. 

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Roadmap from Auto Finance News. Since 1996, the nation’s leading newsletter on automotive lending and leasing. It is Monday, August 11th, and I’m Aiden Bush. Today I am joined with Keith May, Senior Vice President and Auto Leader at Synchrony, to talk about aftermarket trends in the auto industry. Before we get started, how about you just kind of introduce yourself and maybe describe some of your background at Synchrony for us? Thanks Aidan. Appreciate it. Glad to be here. Big fan of auto finance news and and a long time list listener and reader of your your content. My name is Keith Made. I am the auto leader for Synchrony. I’ve been with Synchrony for almost 10 years at this point and before that with GE Capital. And I’ve had the pleasure of of leading the auto business for the last three. I before that had the the benefit of of leading our power sports business. So I’ve been in and around your circle for some time. That’s great to hear and and thank you again for kind of taking the time to chat with us. We really appreciate it. I want to kind of start off with something we first mentioned, you know, in a lot of ways, June, July and really the beginning of August is the sort of season for family vacations, Rd. trips, these sort of longer scale getaways. And while people are dealing with that, they’re also dealing with these kind of rising cost of repair prices. So if something goes wrong while you’re on the road, if you know there’s a tire issue or you know, God forbid, your machine breakdown, we’re seeing that those kind of prices to get your car fixed are rising, I believe. Correct me if I’m wrong. According to y’all, you know, repair prices have gone up 43% since 2019. And I’m just kind of curious, like what is the cause for that rising price increase and like is that still trending up? It’s a great question. I I think First off 100% agree that that costs continue to rise. I think be in addition to that consumers are using and owning vehicles different. In 2025 than they were in 2019. I think we all remember where we were in 2019 and 2020 before our lives got turned a little upside down, and it’s caused a different form of ownership or usage of vehicles. Compared to what was going on before, our commutes to and from work are different. Some of us are are commuting upstairs and downstairs instead of across town and Uptown, but as a result what we’ve seen. Is a unique adjustment to the car park, the age of the car park. It’s older than it than it has been and that’s bringing with it some complexity. Beyond that, we’ve seen the introduction, substantial introduction of hybrids and pure electric vehicles. And it’s just making the composition of the car park just different than it was. So when you compare, when you bring all of that together, you find that you’re now subject to a variety of forces. Certainly the complexity of vehicles is greater than it has been. That comes with cost, different components.
More centers, unique technology that’s needed to diagnose and treat. We have the cost of Labor have gone up tremendously. It’s very hard in our conversations with dealers and merchants and repair repair shops around the country. It’s really hard to get talent. At a lot of their shops and at the very least it’s hard to retain that talent at at sort of old costs. The cost per hour has just continued to escalate and the needs of the capabilities are are are more than they had been before. So you add those to to the mix and then it’s just general inflation, which we know has been an issue for some time and now we’re all starting to to. Wait and see and in some case deal with the tariff situation. So when you’re thinking about the aftermarket, you don’t necessarily have to deal so much with the cost of the new, you have to deal with the cost of the replacement. And so those components are being sourced globally.
And depending on where they’re coming from, they’ll have a major influence on the cost as well. Yeah, I think that’s a really great point. And I wanted to ask sort of on the, you know, broader tariff induced market uncertainty, how is that affecting consumer sentiment when it comes to repairs? Are customers, you know, opting to kind of repair their vehicle rather than just trade in or get new or are you seeing, are you also seeing a kind of wait and see? The behavior of like I would rather like wait even to get my car repaired because I have so many other bills. Yeah. So this is where I’m I feel fortunate to work for a big company like Synchrony and and and get to see and understand data that comes at an enterprise level rather than just our auto business. So Synchrony has about 70 million card holders in the United States across a variety of. Industries. And what we end up doing on a monthly basis is we survey a sample population of those consumers to see how they’re feeling about just the general economy and their ability to sort of navigate within it. And I’ll tell you.
As our as we closed our June, our June survey, the primary word that that keeps getting used is anxiety. Consumers are anxious about not necessarily knowing how this is all going to play out and we’re not. Just talking about car maintenance or replacement parts or Rd. trips, we’re talking about just their general cost of living consumers in June compared to prior months. We asked them how comfortable do you feel your ability is to pay for an unexpected expense of $1000 and an unexpected expense of $400. Well, in June we saw that. Almost 70% of our respondents felt like they could afford a $400.00 expense. That came down just a little bit from the last time we asked them. However, that number 70% drops to 50% when we asked them, could you afford $1000? Wow. And that plays into the sentiment that we’re starting to feel in our survey data that consumers are just not comfortable, as comfortable as they were. Their primary focus right now is on reducing their debt burden and improving their savings. And focusing less on large, large purchases. Now we don’t necessarily control when our cars break down or when we have to replace a tire. So when when we speak to our partners in in the United States and in the merchants. Or the repair shops. Here’s what we’re we’re finding is we’re finding that consumers are, they are deferring maintenance, meaning they’re waiting longer to get routine work done or a repair work done and when they bring it in. They’re more than likely to break that expense up into smaller chunks. You know, we’ve what we’ve found is that consumers are likely to opt in to the kinds of services that get them back on the road faster and safer. That they they may not immediately. They may not immediately agree to do the work that might be proactive and enduring. And So what we’re finding is, you know, as we talked about earlier, the costs of the expenses are going up. They’ve slowed down a little bit, believe it or not. In the in the the summer months of 2025 compared to where they were in the fall and winter of 2024, but they still have have on average started to climb towards that $1000 mark, but more importantly is the repeat spend. That second, that second purchase that they have to make is now over $700.00. So in reality, you know, we’re talking about $1700 worth of spend that they know they have to handle. And what they’ve done is they’ve taken that one time, broken it up over. A number of a number of different visits just to try to reduce that anxiety, to reduce that debt burden and afford it, really be able to afford it compared to just what life is throwing at them. Yeah. And I think that’s such a an interesting point that kind of that that preventative aspect can get diminished when you know they’re dealing with so many existing monthly payments or or costs that it really is sort of a, you know, kind of pay what’s immediately due like you said if there is a repair or something. You know, auto isn’t very much a necessity industry. People need their cars to get to work, so they’re going to pay if they have to. But otherwise it sounds like there’s really this kind of, you know, month to month, you know, survival, so to speak. Yes, very much. I wanted to ask because my understanding is kind of Synchrony, you know offers this car care kind of credit card program to to address some of these you know kind of repair concerns and you know kind of other you know costs associated with your with your car. I was hoping you could kind of go into maybe the scope of that. And just kind of generally what this program is for, you know, kind of our listeners who might not be aware. Yeah, thanks for asking. So we at Synchrony have a Synchrony Car Care credit card and we partner with over 45 different auto retail merchants, tire retailers, aftermarket stores, garages. To help their customers. Get their car or truck serviced, maintained, repaired and be able to pay for it in affordable monthly payments. What we’ve done for for more than 30 years, Synchrony Car Care has existed. And what we what we’ve done is we’ve given both merchants and consumers the ability to break what I, you know as I referred to earlier about $1700 really you know per visit or per per repair order. Down into affordable monthly payments of six months, 12 months or 18 months depending on what the merchant feels they need. And and and consumers you know have demonstrated year in year out how important being able to balance their their expenses. Are especially in a a challenged economic environment where there’s a lot of uncertainty and anxiety. So we’ve got the the affordable monthly payments of 6 to 12 or even 18 months. And beyond create, you know, create variety of options for consumers that match their affordability or the flexibility that they need in payment. The card is very dynamic in that it’s actually accepted nationwide. So we’ve built it on the rails of a major. Credit card network. So it can be used not only at the place where they got their new tires or their car repaired or maintenance, but it can be used at all gas stations across the country. It can be used to pay for car insurance, EV charging. It could be used for tolls. It could be used at a an auto body or mechanic. You know, one of the things that we just we just launched with the card and its utility, you can use it at your DMV or your BMV to pay for a car registration.
I just paid for my two cars to be registered here in North Carolina. It is not cheap and so consumers need to be able to renew their licenses. And and pay for car registration and insurance. And so we feel very good that that the card can be used along the entire journey for the car and truck owner. They can get it with applying either on our website or on the website. Sites or in the stores of our partners that they can find at synchronycarcare.com and to qualify, we’ve started just taking a soft hit to the credit bureaus, so no hard hit is is needed to qualify for the product. There’s no annual fee. We try to protect from fraud, liability and the cards. The accounts can be leveraged 24/7 on our websites with sort of custom, custom account alerts so they understand, you know, when they need to attend to any sort of bills that are due. But we feel great about it. We’ve got millions of cardholders, 45 partners across the country and and it’s really proven to be a very. Useful tool for consumers who need the flexibility and the the payment options just to make their lives a little bit easier. And our merchants have shown that it really does help convert sales because not a lot of people. Like being met with surprise of a $1700 or $900 or $1000 auto repair bill, especially when they’re planning on taking a road trip with their family and. They’ve already got that budgeted, so it helps break those, break those into chunks of 150 to $200 rather than $1000 out of the gate. Yeah, I can tell you even anecdotally, my car, it needs to get repaired later this week and I am not looking forward to whatever the price will be. So I get that’s definitely a concern. Well, we focus a lot kind of on the, you know, kind of consumer side. I did want to and I know we don’t have a ton of time left here, but I did want to kind of. We can help you with that. Quickly pivot to what you’re seeing on the dealership side, maybe with your dealer partners. My understanding is that kind of some historical wisdom has been that as you know as profits slim, which it might may happen in the coming months as you know tariff induced price hikes are expected to. Increase the cost of vehicles anywhere from 3000 up to according to Cox Automotive that you know you really see dealerships start to focus on you know kind of aftermarket repairs, F&I servicing as this sort of profits at profit center. In the meantime, I’m curious what if you expect. That to happen and then also what that means for your partnerships with car dealers, you know, kind of during these next few months where we are still feeling that kind of broad market uncertainty. Yeah, I don’t. I don’t expect it to change. I think you’re right. I in the last 60 days have spent time at at car dealerships for service and I could tell you as someone who spends a lot of time observing.
People coming and going on those kinds of settings. The this, the dealer services bays were jammed and the the sales floor. Was light now point in time, weekday, I get it. But you know, compared to where we were years ago, the lots are full and you know, I I pay a lot of attention to the incentives and the rebates that are being offered both on new. And certified pre-owned and dealer and and service based. As I said earlier, you know we continue to see the aging car park just get older. We don’t expect that to change. Consumers are taking better care of their customers that the cars are designed to last longer. And with a lot of the unknowns over what’s going to happen, not only with tariffs. On some of the new stuff coming in, but what’s going to happen with some of the domestic and international manufacturers and how they’re going to change how they make vehicles? In the interim, you know, we do continue to think that consumers are are more than likely to to ride their cars longer and with when they choose to do that, they’re going to need to just maintain a proactive approach towards. Vehicle health and whether that means going back and visiting their their their friendly dealership or they might have purchased that or finding another one that’s an expert in the vehicle that they have. If they’re not under warranty anymore, they need to be mindful of the expenses that are coming their way and what will happen if they get presented with a repair order that isn’t is beyond what they were anticipating. And and you know, I I think unfortunately over the next 6 to 12 months as the tariff uncertainty persists and by the way, there’s still, there will still be inflation. Yeah Is, you know, having their having all their options available to them and help them with the affordability and and that’s where we can be a good partner not only to the dealerships of which we work with a number of them in the United States today, but it’s also in consumers as they’re evaluating their options. Yeah. No, I think that that all makes a lot of sense. I think that’s just about kind of all the questions I had for you. So thank you so much again for joining us. I did want to kind of open the floor in case there were any final things you thought our listeners should know. And if not, that’s totally fine as well. I appreciate it, Aidan. Always great to talk with you and the team at at Auto Finance. Synchrony is a great relationship. You know, I will say you know we we view ourselves as as subject matter experts in the payment and affordability. Options that exist for dealers and and merchants in the auto aftermarket. We’re here to help convert more sales and make consumers feel like they can get back on the road faster and safer than they were before. And to the extent we can help, you know, please let us know. Please let us know. Yeah. Well, thank you so much again, Keith, for joining us and thanks you guys, the listeners for joining us on the roadmap. Be sure to follow us on X and LinkedIn and also be be aware that registration is also open for our upcoming Auto Finance Summit 2025 and Power Sports Finance Summit 2025 in the fall.