7:37 am, December 4, 2025
The most profitable retailers in the UK have been revealed in this year’s Car Dealer Top 100 – and the biggest just got bigger!
Topping the survey once again was the undefeatable juggernaut Arnold Clark, clocking up £380m profit in 2024.
The Car Dealer Top 100, compiled by Cooper Parry and sponsored by Carwow, looks at the most successful new and used car dealers in the UK, and focuses on the only stat that matters – how much money they make.
Our list analyses accounts for 2024 where possible and focuses on EBITDA profit figures. This is used as it’s the fairest way to compare car dealers like for like and shows the cash generation of these businesses.
Overall profit and revenue numbers for 2024 have dropped after a well-documented difficult year for the motor trade.
Total profit for the Car Dealer Top 100 stood at £2bn in 2024 – down from £2.6bn in last year’s list, which looked at financial performance for 2023.
Revenue was also down drastically on the year before at £72.8bn – compared to £88.8bn.
Data from car dealers’ latest accounts were used where possible to compile the list and independent and franchised dealers are included. The majority use 2024 accounts with a year end of December 31.
Following Arnold Clark at the top was Sytner with profits of £205m – a dramatic drop from the £246m it achieved the year before.
In third place was Lookers with £125m, CEM Day was fourth with £93m and Vertu rounded out the top five with £86m.
Russell Borrie, Arnold Clark’s chief executive officer, said: ‘We’re delighted that Arnold Clark has been awarded the Car Dealer Top 100 title!
‘This achievement reflects the dedication of our incredible team and our commitment to long-term growth.
‘By investing in cutting-edge digital systems and expanding initiatives like Arnold Clark Charge and our luxury car portfolio, we continue to anticipate the needs of our customers and drive the future of the motor industry.’
Charging up the table some 40 places and into 16th place on the chart was luxury and supercar dealer Tom Hartley Junior, our most successful used car dealer.
After a year which saw the talented seller find homes for Bernie Ecclestone’s collection and Mansour Ojjeh’s McLaren collection, THJ achieved profits of £31.2m.
Hartley Junior said: ‘It was a great year and our profits reflected such. However, I am most proud of the fact that in that financial year we sold circa $700,000,000 worth of cars, a number no other dealer at our end of the market has ever come close to before and I am pleased to report we will eclipse that in this calendar year.’
Chief compiler of the list, Ian McMahon, partner at Cooper Parry, said there were a number of struggles in the first half of 2024 and it followed a dramatic drop in used car prices at the end of 2023.
‘We’ve seen a fairly significant fall in EBITDA this year,’ he explained.
In a video interview about this year’s Top 100, which you can watch above, McMahon explained that a transition to agency sales for some car makers had caused some of the drop in revenue.
‘Also it’s that cost creep, the continual increase in facilities costs, insurance and, absolutely key for this industry, employee remuneration, that has all gone only one way in 2024 – up,’ he added.
John Veichmanis, CEO of Carwow, added: ‘There’s been quite a significant amount of inflation and costs in payroll taxation, insurance, so I definitely get a sense when I talk to dealer partners that it has been really challenging.
‘I don’t think consumer confidence has fallen off a cliff, but we definitely see that consumers are making more considered purchases.
‘Even though we’re seeing the total number of car changes is actually quite healthy. I think it is more difficult and time consuming to manage these customers and get them into a new car.’
