How much to charge for tire storage
A guide for independent shops. No industry averages, because we have not measured any — the useful answer is the one that comes out of your own space, your own labour and your own town.
Work out the floor first. The space costs you something, the handling costs you something, and a set is handled twice a season. Add those up, divide by the sets you hold, and you have the figure below which storage is a service you are paying to provide. Everything above it is the decision.
The shape of the price
Per set, per season, charged at the changeover. Simple to quote on the phone and simple to collect.
One set, one fee
Four tires is a set, whether they are on rims or not, and the fee covers the season rather than the month. A monthly charge on a thing that happens twice a year is a bill nobody wants to administer.
Say what it includes
Off the car, away on the rack, findable, and back on the car at the other end. Put that in the same sentence as the number and the conversation is over before it starts.
Price the season, not the shelf
What the customer is buying is not six months of shelf. It is not having four tires in the back of a car, in a hallway, or in a garage they do not have.
What belongs as an extra
Separate work, separate line. A fee that quietly includes everything is a fee that loses money on the shops that ask for everything.
Washing and bagging
Real work with a real cost, and a visible reason the set comes back clean. Worth charging for and worth saying you do.
Valve stems, balancing, disposal
Done at the changeover, not part of storage. A finished set that has to go away is a disposal job whoever stored it.
A worked example, with the inputs showing
Arithmetic, not a benchmark: change any of these and the answer changes.
Say a shop holds 150 sets, the unit costs $3,600 for the season, a handling takes 20 minutes and an hour on the floor costs $45. That is 100 hours of handling across the season — two handlings a set — or $4,500 of time, on top of the space. The two together come to $8,100, which is $54 a set before the storage has earned anything.
Those are made-up inputs for the sake of the sum, not a claim about any shop. The point is the order of the numbers: the labour is usually bigger than the rent, and it is the one most often left out.
Questions
- How is seasonal tire storage usually priced?
- Per set, per season, paid at the changeover — one fee covering the months the set is on your rack and the handling at both ends. It is the simplest thing to quote on the phone and the simplest thing to collect, which is most of why it is the common shape.
- What should the storage fee include?
- At a minimum: taking the set off the car, putting it away, keeping it findable, and getting it back on the car at the other end. Say so in the same sentence as the price. Washing, bagging, new valve stems and disposal of a finished set are separate work and belong as separate lines.
- Should I take a deposit for tire storage?
- Some shops do, to cover the sets nobody comes back for. If you take one, write down what happens to it and when — a deposit nobody can explain two years later is worse than no deposit.
- What if a customer never comes back for their tires?
- Decide the rule before it happens: how long you hold a set, how you try to reach them, and what you do then. Keep the dates and the attempts on the record. The argument, when it comes, is always about what was said and when.
Once you are charging for it
Treadstock keeps the fee on the set: what was charged, what is paid, and who still owes for the season.