Profits from dealership Fixed Operations and Finance & Insurance partly offset a substantial decline in front-end profits on new and used cars and trucks in the first quarter, according to the Q1 2026 Presidio-NCM Average Dealership Performance Benchmark Report.
Overall, net pretax profit for the average U.S. dealership dropped 11.2% versus the first quarter of 2025, Kevin Tynan, director of research for The Presidio Group, said in a webinar on April 12. Average gross profit per vehicle fell by a similar percentage, to $1,781 for new, and $1,253 for used, the report said.
“March [2025] was unprecedented,” Tynan said, because sales boomed in Q1 last year, just before new import tariffs were to take effect. “Really, what we saw this year was the payback from that.”
Meanwhile, quarterly dealership results for Fixed Ops and F&I remain higher than 2019, before the pandemic — but they’re not improving at as high a rate as they were recently, according to the report.
Average F&I income per retail unit was $1,727 in the first quarter of 2026, up 7.1% versus a year ago. In the fourth quarter of 2025, average F&I income per retail unit was $1,765, up 9.1% versus a year prior. F&I per-unit figures are for new and used vehicles combined.
On the Fixed Ops side, the average dealership gross profit for the first quarter was up just 1.4% versus a year ago. In the fourth quarter of 2025, average dealership Fixed Ops gross profit was up 7% year over year.
In the long run, Presidio’s Tynan said it’s healthier for the auto retail industry to revert to more-normal gross margins per vehicle, instead of the unsustainable margins of 2021 and 2022, when the shortage of inventory due to lower new-vehicle production drove sky-high margins.
Customers back then routinely paid above sticker price. The deadline for new tariffs last year also produced a spike in demand, where customers were narrowly focused on beating the deadline. Prices didn’t spike as high as before, in part because inventory is higher today, relative to those years.
Still, the year-ago spike in demand was enough to create what Tynan called an “impossible” comparison, for the first quarter of 2026.
For shoppers, the demand spike was “about getting deals done” before prices rise due to tariffs, Tynan said of Q1 2025. “You had volume, and you had margin, because the consumers just weren’t as concerned about pricing,” he noted.
The Presidio‑NCM Average Dealership Performance Benchmark is based on aggregated financial results of more than 4,000 U.S. franchised dealerships of all brands and sizes that work with NCM Associates, an automotive consulting and training company.
NCM Associates, based in Kansas City, Missouri, is a dealership consulting and training company, perhaps best known for moderating 20 Group peer-to-peer sessions among dealers.
The Presidio Group, with offices in the Denver and Atlanta markets, is a specialist in dealership mergers and acquisitions, capital raising, and investments in automotive retail.
