From One Hour to Fifteen Minutes: Anatomy of a Floor-Time Collapse
Buyers spend under three hours at a dealership and two thirds wait for F&I. Where that hour goes, what moves off the desk, and what nobody has measured.
Alfred BEditorial Reviews
The finance office is the most complained-about hour in vehicle retail and the least measured one. Everybody in the building has a theory about where it goes. Hardly anyone has run a stopwatch on it.
That is strange, because the rest of the visit is counted carefully. The 2025 Cox Automotive Car Buyer Journey Study, released in January 2026 and fielded to 2,344 buyers between 6 August and 5 September 2025, puts time with the selling dealer at 2 hours 55 minutes, split 2 hours 48 minutes for new-vehicle buyers and 2 hours 57 minutes for used. Cox Automotive sells retailing software to dealerships, which is worth knowing when weighing its research, though the buyer survey itself is the largest recurring one in the market.
Dealership F&I time is the stretch of a vehicle purchase spent on credit application, identity and income verification, product presentation, contracting and funding. No published study breaks that stretch into steps. What is measured is that buyers who complete more of the deal online spend roughly 41 minutes less at the dealership, according to Cox Automotive's 2025 study.
So the honest version of this article is a model, not a benchmark. Below is the anatomy, labelled as such, with the measured figures kept separate from the estimated ones.
Where does the time at a dealership actually go?
The most useful public evidence is comparative rather than absolute. Cox Automotive's 2025 study found that buyers it classifies as "mostly digital," meaning they completed more than half the purchase online, saved about 41 minutes at the dealership against "light digital" buyers, with new-vehicle buyers saving 44 minutes and used-vehicle buyers 39. The year before, in the 2024 edition of the same study, the gap was wider in absolute terms: 2 hours 15 minutes at the dealership for mostly-digital buyers against 3 hours 4 minutes for light-digital ones.
Neither figure isolates the finance office. Both describe the same mechanism. Work done before arrival is work not done at the desk, and the saving is measured in tens of minutes, not in tens of seconds.
On the waiting itself there is one recurring measurement. CDK Global's The State of F&I at the Dealership 2026, published 15 June 2026, reported that two-thirds of buyers had to wait to meet with an F&I manager and nearly half waited more than 20 minutes. CDK Global is a dealership software vendor and publishes this study as marketing research, so treat the direction as more reliable than the decimal. Its earlier 2025 F&I Shopper Study, published 25 September 2025 and based on more than 1,200 buyers, found that when customers wait more than 30 minutes, likelihood to recommend the dealership falls by 25%.
Waiting is the one component nobody defends. It produces no disclosure, no signature and no gross.
What are the named steps inside the F&I hour?
Here is the anatomy. The steps are real and sequenced as they occur on almost any floor in North America. The minute allocations are an illustrative model built from the named steps of the process, not a published benchmark, because no published step-level breakdown of dealership F&I time exists.
Illustrative model of a 60-minute F&I sequence. Step names are descriptive of standard North American practice; minute allocations are estimates for structuring the argument, not measured data.
| # | Step | What happens | Model minutes | Movable off the desk? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hand-off and queue | Deal moves from sales to finance; buyer waits for an open desk | 12 | No, but shrinkable |
| 2 | Credit application capture | Name, address history, employment, income, government ID number, references keyed in | 8 | Yes |
| 3 | Identity check | Licence inspected, second piece requested, address matched to the application | 4 | Yes |
| 4 | Credit pull and lender submission | Bureau file pulled, application routed to one or more lenders | 3 | Yes |
| 5 | Approval and conditions returned | Lender responds with terms, tier and stipulations | 5 | Partly |
| 6 | Stipulation gathering | Pay stubs, proof of residence, insurance binder, references chased in the moment | 10 | Yes |
| 7 | Product presentation | Menu walked, warranty and protection products explained and priced | 9 | Rarely |
| 8 | Contracting | Contract generated, disclosures read, signatures collected | 6 | Partly |
| 9 | Funding package assembly | Documents scanned, package built and sent to the lender | 3 | Yes |
Read the right-hand column and the shape of the problem appears. Five of the nine steps are information collection and verification. They exist because a lender needs to know that a named person with a verifiable income is the one signing. None of them require the buyer to be sitting in a chair in the dealership when they happen.
Which steps do buyers already want moved?
This is where the model stops guessing, because Cox Automotive measured it directly. Its 2025 Car Buyer Journey Study asked buyers which steps they completed online and which they would have preferred to complete online. The gaps are the argument.
Share of vehicle buyers completing each step online versus the share who preferred to, from the 2025 Cox Automotive Car Buyer Journey Study, fielded August to September 2025 among 2,344 buyers. Cox Automotive is a dealership software vendor.
| Step | Completed online | Preferred online | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apply for credit or financing | 38% | 52% | 14 points |
| Receive financing qualification | 33% | 47% | 14 points |
| Select F&I products | 33% | 57% | 24 points |
| Review and sign final contract | 42% | 56% | 14 points |
| Receive trade-in offer | 34% | 40% | 6 points |
The F&I product gap is the largest in the set, at 24 points, and it is the one I would move last. The menu conversation is the step where a buyer with a question gets an answer from a person who knows the product, and pushing it to a screen to save nine minutes trades something real for something small. The credit application and the verification steps are different. Nobody has ever enjoyed reading their employer's address off a phone to someone typing it into a terminal.
In Canada the appetite is similar and slightly more cautious. CADA's The Road Ahead study, published June 2025, found 47% of Canadians want to limit in-person dealership visits while 86% still want to physically interact with the vehicle before buying. People want fewer minutes indoors, not fewer dealerships.
What is the fifteen-minute version?
Resequence rather than remove. Steps 2, 3, 4 and 9 move to the buyer's own device before arrival: application keyed by the buyer, identity verified against the document and the person holding it, bureau pulled on consent, package assembled as it is captured. Step 6, the stipulation chase, changes character entirely when income is confirmed at source instead of reconstructed from photographed pay stubs.
What remains on the desk is the approval conversation, the product menu and the signature. Call it fifteen minutes, plus whatever the queue still costs.
The verification piece is not cosmetic. Point Predictive's 2026 Auto Lending Fraud Trends Report, published 8 April 2026 and drawn from more than 300 million historical applications, put annual auto lending fraud exposure at a record $10.4 billion, up from $9.2 billion the year before, with income and employment misrepresentation accounting for 45% of it. That is a vendor-published figure from a company selling fraud analytics, and it points at the same step the time study points at. The pay stub is both the slowest artifact in the hour and the easiest one to fake.
And the money at stake in that hour is not small. The Q2 2025 Haig Report, published by the buy-sell advisory firm Haig Partners, put average F&I gross profit per vehicle retailed at $2,515 across publicly traded auto retail groups. Nothing in the resequencing above touches product penetration. It changes when the paperwork happens, not whether the menu is presented.
What we don't know
No published source breaks the F&I hour into named steps with measured minutes. We looked at Cox Automotive, CDK Global, J.D. Power, NADA and CADA. The industry measures total dealership time, wait-time thresholds and satisfaction, and it measures F&I income closely, but the step-level time study does not appear to exist in public. The table above is our model and it is labelled as one.
There is also no Canadian equivalent of the Cox time series. CADA's 2025 work covers attitudes and dealer technology readiness rather than minutes on the floor. Every time figure in this article is American.
One more limit. The Fifth Circuit vacated the FTC's CARS Rule on 27 January 2025, as reported by Holland & Knight in February 2025, which removed a federal disclosure and consent framework that would have added defined steps to this sequence. State and provincial rules still apply, and they vary, so any minute count for contracting is jurisdictional.
Common questions
How long does the F&I process take at a car dealership?
No published study measures it directly. The 2025 Cox Automotive Car Buyer Journey Study puts total time with the selling dealer at 2 hours 55 minutes, and CDK Global's 2026 study found nearly half of buyers waited more than 20 minutes just to reach an F&I desk.
Which parts of dealership F&I time can move online?
Credit application capture, identity verification, the credit pull and funding package assembly all happen without the buyer present. Cox Automotive's 2025 study found 52% of buyers preferred to apply for financing online while only 38% actually did, a 14-point gap.
Does shortening F&I time reduce product income?
Nothing in the available data suggests it does. The Q2 2025 Haig Report from advisory firm Haig Partners recorded $2,515 average F&I gross per vehicle retailed at public retail groups. Resequencing moves data collection earlier; the product presentation itself stays with the F&I manager.
Why do stipulations take so long to clear?
Stipulations are lender conditions requiring proof of income, residence or insurance, usually satisfied by documents the buyer did not bring. Point Predictive's 2026 report found income and employment misrepresentation accounted for 45% of $10.4 billion in auto lending fraud exposure, which is why lenders ask.
How much dealership time do digital buyers actually save?
About 41 minutes. The 2025 Cox Automotive Car Buyer Journey Study found buyers completing more than half the purchase online spent roughly 41 minutes less at the dealership than light-digital buyers, with new-vehicle buyers saving 44 minutes and used-vehicle buyers 39.
Carousel moves identity, consents and verification off the desk and onto the buyer's phone. See the auto intake suite
