← Equipment rental break-even calculator
The common answer is to look up what the branch down the road charges for the same machine and shade it. That sets your price from someone else's cost base, someone else's finance deal, and — the part nobody publishes — someone else's utilization. A rate that works for a depot renting the same excavator 18 days a month can be underwater for an owner renting it 7.
Open the free rental break-even calculator
Utilization. Ownership cost does not pause when the asset is in the yard. Finance or depreciation, insurance, storage, licensing and scheduled servicing accrue for the whole month, and only the billable days can carry them. Divide monthly ownership cost by expected billable days — not by 30 — and you have the ownership recovery each day has to earn.
That single division is why a purchase-price rule of thumb misleads. Two operators can pay the same for the same machine and need genuinely different rates.
| Cost | Behaves like |
|---|---|
| Finance or depreciation, insurance, storage, licensing, scheduled servicing | Monthly, whether or not it goes out — recovered across billable days only |
| Delivery and collection | Per booking, and often per booking regardless of hire length |
| Cleaning and turnaround | Per booking, and it consumes a day you cannot rebill |
| Fuel, consumables, wear parts | Per day or per hour of use |
| Damage and loss reserve | A percentage you set — cheaper than discovering the average the hard way |
Delivery and cleaning are the two most often left out, because they feel like overhead rather than part of the hire. On short bookings they frequently exceed the ownership recovery for the same booking.
The calculator runs that arithmetic in your browser and shows the contribution a proposed price leaves after variable costs, plus the monthly utilization the asset needs to recover its ownership cost at that price. You can download a plain-text snapshot of the quote for your own records.
An asset costing $1,800 a month to own, rented at 8 billable days a month, carries $225 a day of ownership recovery before anything else happens. Add $90 of delivery and collection, half a day of cleaning, and a damage reserve, and a "competitive" $200 day rate is losing money on every booking — while the same machine at 16 billable days carries $112.50 of ownership recovery and the same $200 looks entirely different. Nothing about the machine changed. Only the utilization did.
Start from what the asset costs you to own for a month — finance or depreciation, insurance, storage, licensing, scheduled maintenance — then divide that by the number of billable days you actually expect, not by 30. Add the variable cost of the individual booking: delivery and collection, cleaning and turnaround, fuel or consumables, and a damage reserve. The day rate has to cover both, plus the margin you intend to keep.
Ownership cost accrues every day of the month whether the asset is out or sitting in the yard. If a machine bills 8 days a month, those 8 days carry all 30 days of ownership cost. The same machine at 16 billable days carries half as much per day. Two operators with an identical purchase price and identical financing can have day rates that differ by a factor of two purely because of utilization, which is why copying a competitor's published rate is not a pricing method.
No. Break-even is the floor — the number below which the booking loses money once ownership recovery and the booking's own variable costs are counted. The quoted price is a commercial decision above that floor. The value of knowing the floor is that you can discount deliberately, and stop, rather than discovering after the season that a busy year did not pay for the asset.