Heavy-Duty Mechanic Shortage: How to Keep Your Fleet Running When You’re Short-Staffed

The heavy-duty mechanic shortage is hitting fleets on both sides of the Canada-US border. Here’s what you need to know before you act.

Key takeaways

• In Quebec, Camo-Route reports close to 3,000 vacant mechanic positions in trucking, with a 100% placement rate for MVLR graduates. (Source: Camo-Route, via Repères)
• Across North America, 65.5% of diesel repair shops were understaffed in 2025. (Source: ATRI, 2025)
• The average diesel technician is 41 years old, and only 8% have 5 years of experience or less in the trade: new talent isn’t arriving fast enough to offset upcoming retirements. (Sources: Data USA; State of Diesel Technicians Report, Randall Reilly/Shell Lubricants)
• The strongest lever isn’t recruitment, it’s preventive maintenance: the industry target is an 80% preventive / 20% corrective ratio, and every 10-point gain in preventive maintenance cuts total costs by 6 to 8%.

Finding a Good Mechanic Has Become an Extreme Sport

If you run a heavy-duty repair shop, you feel it every time a veteran retires with no one ready to take their place. The heavy-duty mechanic shortage isn’t a rough patch, it’s a structural problem on both sides of the border.

In Quebec, Camo-Route counts close to 3,000 vacant mechanic positions in trucking, out of roughly 17,000 across the entire road transport sector. The placement rate for heavy-duty vehicle mechanics (MVLR) reaches 100%: every graduate finds work, there just aren’t enough of them. In the US, ATRI reports that 65.5% of diesel repair shops were understaffed in 2025. The fix, then, doesn’t depend on recruitment alone, it comes down to how you run your shop.

Why Is the Mechanic Shortage Hitting So Hard?

According to TMC, the top five maintenance concerns reported by fleet members this spring were, in order:

Three factors are compounding. First, retirements: the average technician is 41 years old (Data USA), and 48% have more than 20 years of experience in the trade, up from just 16% in 2018 (State of Diesel Technicians Report, Randall Reilly/Shell Lubricants). The share of veterans keeps climbing, with too few new hires to replace them. Second, undertrained new hires: MVLR training runs 1,800 hours over 18 months, yet across North America, 61.8% of new technicians arrive with no formal training at all, forcing shops to invest an average of 357 hours and $8,211 before they become productive (ATRI, 2025). Third, rising truck complexity: between onboard diagnostics and the shift toward CNG and electric powertrains, the bar for entry keeps rising while the candidate pool keeps shrinking.

Centralize Information So You’re Not Dependent on One Person

In many shops, a single mechanic holds an outsized share of the know-how. The day they leave, the shop is at risk.

Fleet maintenance management software solves this two ways. First, it standardizes procedures: work orders created automatically, documented job history, documented steps, standard times for recurring tasks. Any technician can pick up where another left off. Second, it gives new hires immediate access to each vehicle’s complete history (past interventions, parts installed, recurring issues). That matters even more given that more than 30% of graduates from formal programs are rated unqualified in 20 essential skills by the shops that hire them (ATRI, 2025). The result: faster upskilling and fewer errors.

Make Preventive Maintenance a Non-Negotiable Priority

When you’re short-staffed, the instinct is to push back whatever can wait. The trap is that delaying preventive maintenance creates exactly the emergencies you were trying to avoid.

And those emergencies are expensive: downtime on a heavy-duty truck runs between $448 and $760 USD per day (up to $880 once fixed costs are included), the average fleet loses 8.7 days of unplanned downtime per truck per year, and a single breakdown costs $3,000 to $9,000 USD (FleetNet America; OTR Performance). On the flip side, every 10-point gain in preventive maintenance cuts total maintenance costs by 6 to 8%, and 95%+ compliance with maintenance schedules cuts breakdowns in half.

Fleet maintenance management software generates reminders automatically (mileage, engine hours, or set intervals) and creates work orders in advance. Your team knows what to do, and when.

Steer With the Right Performance Indicators

When you’re short-staffed, you can’t do everything: you need to prioritize with data, not gut feel. The most useful KPIs when understaffed, with industry targets:

Availability rate: 93% or higher.

Preventive/corrective ratio: 80/20 (most fleets start at 50/50).

First-time fix rate: 90% or higher.

Cost per mile or per engine hour: this exposes underperforming units. As a benchmark, average repair and maintenance cost was $0.198 USD per mile in 2024 (ATRI, 2025).

Good software centralizes these indicators in real time, with no manual compiling.

Assign Tasks by Skill Level

Handing simple tasks to your most qualified technicians wastes a scarce resource. Reserve your senior mechanics for complex diagnostics and major repairs.

A concrete example: the pre-trip safety inspection. Under FMCSA regulations, drivers must complete a daily vehicle inspection, and in Quebec, the Loi PECVL requires a visual and audio check within 24 hours of a heavy vehicle’s departure. This is exactly the kind of task a junior technician can take on, freeing up your experts for the work that actually needs their expertise. (Source: SAAQ; Loi PECVL)

Document for Compliance and Shop Memory

When a key technician leaves, they often take years of unwritten knowledge about your units with them. Systematic documentation (every intervention logged, every part recorded) protects that knowledge from turnover. In Quebec, it’s also a requirement: safety inspection reports must be kept for 6 months, and repair records for 12 months, under the Loi PECVL. Similar recordkeeping obligations apply across most of Canada and the US.

In Summary

Running Your Shop With Fewer Mechanics Than Before?

MIR-RT helps hundreds of shops keep their fleet running strong, even when short-staffed: standardized processes, automatic preventive maintenance scheduling, and real-time KPI tracking, all in one system built for heavy-duty vehicles and equipment. See how MIR-RT fits your shop: request a personalized demo.

Frequently Asked Questions