2026 State of Towing Report Is Coming Soon: Share Your Data and Help Shape the Industry
🔎 In this article: Learn what the State of Towing Report is, why it’s a key resource of reliable information for professionals in the towing and recovery industry, key findings from last year's edition, and how a few minutes of your time can help shape the 2026 data before the report publishes.
Autura is collecting data right now for the 2026 State of Towing Report, what will be our third annual look at the trends, challenges, and opportunities facing the towing and recovery industry. To help us build an accurate, clear picture founding on real and helpful information, we need you — the professionals that run, work for, and interact with towing, recovery, or roadside assistance business — to share your points of view.
What Is the State of Towing Report?
The State of Towing Report is an annual, industry-wide study Autura builds from survey responses we collect directly from towing and recovery professionals across the US and Canada. We gather, analyze, and pair these survey submissions with market research and expert commentary and include questions to contemplate, rounding out the report.
We first launched this project in 2024 with input from 198 towing professionals. The 2025 edition built upon that, and we segmented learnings by business size — from single-truck operations to multi-location fleets earning more than $10 million a year.
Why create the report? Because towing is a hard industry to benchmark. There's no shortage of general transportation and logistics data out there, but very little of it reflects what a towing business actually deals with: insurance renewals, impound yards, cash calls, municipal rotations, and the day-to-day math of tow trucks and operators on the road. We created The State of Towing Report to fill that gap with real numbers from real towing business owners, operators, and enthusiasts.
It's free, and available to the entire industry, whether you use Autura's software or not. The goal is to give the professionals of the towing and recovery community a clear picture of where the industry stands, share growth and progress metrics based upon historical information, and provide real information about what others are doing that could help owners and operators make sound business decisions.
Recap: Learnings from Previous Towing Reports
To give you an idea of what to expect from this year's report, let's peek at a few of the insights and trends that surfaced in previous State of Towing Reports.
- In 2025, many tow operators felt business was slower than the year before: 43% reported being less busy, with only 25% reporting more call volume. With 40,000+ towing and recovery businesses now operating in the US, market saturation appears to be spreading demand thinner across more competitors.
- Tow business owners / operators leaned on price increases and commercial accounts to offset the squeeze: 72% percent raised prices (or planned to) in 2025, and growing commercial accounts was the single most common growth strategy, cited by 70% of respondents, ahead of every other option.
- The number of businesses with impound yards grew year over year, but still underperformed: In 2025, 93% of towing businesses operated an impound yard, up from 86% in 2024. Even so, auction and scrap sales continue to rate among the lowest-performing parts of the business, suggesting there's real revenue still sitting on the table.
- In 2025, hiring pain eased compared to 2024, slightly: Thirty-six percent named hiring and retention a top challenge in 2025, down from 41% in 2024. Nearly a third of respondents said they had rolled out new onboarding, mentorship, or retention programs.
None of these are one-off data points. They illustrate trends we can only confirm, or watch reverse, by asking some of the same questions each year. That's the value of an annual report: it shows where the industry is headed, not just where it stood at one point in time.
Why We Need Your Input for 2026
This report, and the survey that helps us generate it, is as valuable as it is because real towing and recovery professionals who live, breath, and work in this industry share what they know. It isn't based on Autura's (or outsiders') assumptions. It's the industry describing itself, in its own words and its own numbers.
Whether you run one truck or a fleet of a hundred, and regardless of if you're an Autura customer or not, your survey answers help us build a more accurate, more useful picture of the industry than anything else available today. Responses are grouped by business size so the results reflect operations like yours, not a blended average.
So our simple ask? Take the 2026 State of Towing survey
Your responses are completely anonymous, and 100% necessary. They’ll help us share honest, accurate data and information that the towing and recovery community can trust. Your contributions to this free report will help inform business decisions about things like staffing, pricing, technology, regulations, and more. The survey only takes about 15 minutes.
What Might This Year's Data Reveal?
We won't know the answers until the 2026 report publishes later this year, but here's a few things we're curious about:
- Will the topic of insurance hold the #1 challenge spot for a third year running?
- What’s this year’s respondents’ sentiment about towing business consolidation?
- Now that AI is showing up in dispatch conversations and claims narratives, how is its adoption and use playing out in daily operations?
The more respondents who share their answers, the sharper the towing industry picture we can paint will be in our final published report.
Thank you in advance for helping us create this impactful resource.
