Rent vs buy

Renting is cheap for a job and expensive for a year. This works out where the line falls for one machine: real rental pricing on one side, your purchase, carrying and resale figures on the other.

Compact Track Loader

See the listing →

Joseph DeDominic · Loaders - Skid Steers

Your assumptions

The rates come from the operator. These four are yours — we have no way of knowing them, so nothing below is more reliable than what you put here.

Over 12 28-day cycles · about 11.0 months

Buying is cheaper by $14,556.16

Rent it

$52,500

12 cycles × $4,375 all-in

Buy it

$37,943.84

$70,000 + $6,443.84 to keep − $38,500 back

Owning overtakes renting at 9 cycles — about 8.3 months. That scan holds your resale figure fixed, so a machine kept far longer than your horizon is being flattered: it would be worth less at the end than 55% of what you paid.

The working

Renting

One 28-day cycle, priced by the same service that prices a booking. A long-term rental bills per cycle, so the horizon is whole cycles and nothing is interpolated.

28-day rate
$3,500
Rental protection (RPP)
$525
Service fee
$350
One cycle
$4,375
× 12 cycles
$52,500

Our pricing service marks the cycle rate an estimate: a long-term rental is reconciled to the best price of the rate ladder when it is invoiced, and an operator can agree different terms. Treat the rent column as an estimate too.

Owning

The operator’s own sale price, all-in, from the same pricing service.

Purchase
$70,000
Carrying · 10%/yr × 0.92 yr
$6,443.84
Resale · 55% back
−$38,500
Net cost to own
$37,943.84

12 cycles × 28 days ÷ 365 = 0.92 years of carrying cost.

What this deliberately leaves out: financing and the cost of capital, tax treatment, depreciation schedules, downtime while a machine you own is in the shop, and delivery either way. Each of those moves the answer, and none of them is something this page knows about your business.

Pick a listing

The numbers come from one operator’s published rates, so the tool needs to know whose.

Where these numbers come from

The rental side is a live call to the same pricing service the booking panel uses, in long-term mode — one 28-day billing cycle at the operator’s 28-day rate, with rental protection and the marketplace service fee included, exactly as they would appear at checkout. Nothing about the rate ladder is recomputed on this page.

The ownership side is arithmetic on figures you supply. We hold no data on what a machine costs you to keep or what you could sell it for, and the page does not pretend otherwise.