For rental owners and fleet managers
Do your machines actually make money?
Most rental businesses price by copying the yard down the road, then find out a year later that half the fleet never covered its costs. This tool works it out before you commit — what you need to charge, the month the machine pays for itself, and what happens to the deal when it sits idle.
- Free · no sign-up
- Runs in your browser
- No email wall before the answer
- 40 currencies
Three questions most rental businesses cannot answer
Not because the people running them are careless — because the numbers that answer them sit in four different places and nobody has the time to assemble them.
“What should this machine rent for?”
The usual rule of thumb — one to two per cent of the machine’s value per day — was never checked against your finance terms, your maintenance bill or your utilisation. It is a number borrowed from someone else’s business.
“Is this machine paying for itself?”
Your accounts produce one profit figure for the whole company. A strong machine quietly subsidises a weak one, and the P&L cannot tell you which is which. So the loss-making unit stays in the fleet.
“How busy does it need to be?”
Seventy per cent utilisation sounds healthy. On the wrong rate it still loses money every single month. Rate and utilisation only mean something together, and almost nobody looks at them that way.
Finance, without the finance degree
You put in three things you already know: what the machine cost, what you plan to charge, and how busy you expect it to be. Everything else — depreciation, financing, insurance, maintenance, overhead, tax, resale value — is built for you from the model data.
What comes back is not a spreadsheet to decipher. It is four checks, each one green or red against a target you set. If they are green, the deal works. If one is red, the tool tells you the rate that would turn it green.
Example — what the answer looks like
Underneath sit the full profit & loss, balance sheet and cashflow for the machine’s whole rental life. You never have to open them — but your accountant will want to, and they are there.
What you get back
It takes about two minutes
Why this is not the usual free calculator
Most free rental calculators ask for three or four numbers and hand back one. Several will not show you the answer until you give them an email address. They are marketing for rental software, and they are priced accordingly — at nothing, because they are worth about that much to you.
A typical free calculator
- Three to eleven inputs
- One number back: a daily rate
- No view of the machine over its life
- No balance sheet, no cashflow
- Often an email address before the result
- One currency
This one
- Built-in data for around 90 machine models
- Four pass or fail checks against your own targets
- Year-by-year over the full rental life
- Complete profit & loss, balance sheet and cashflow
- The answer first — email only if you want the PDF
- Forty currencies at live rates
Built in, free, no sign-up
Don't know what to put in the boxes? Say it in a sentence.
Tell it what the machine cost, what you plan to charge and how busy it will be. It picks the model, fills the figures in, opens the cost assumptions and tells you whether the deal works — and you can undo the lot with one click.
Guides: how the numbers actually work
Six plain-English guides, each answering its question in the first paragraph and then working through a real machine with real figures. Written for rental owners and fleet managers, not for accountants.
Looking at more than one machine?
The calculator handles a single unit at a time, and that is usually enough. If you are reviewing a rate card that has not been touched in years, sizing a fleet purchase, or trying to work out which units to sell, that is a conversation rather than a form. Tell us what you are looking at.
Questions rental owners ask
How much should I charge to rent out equipment?
There is no single percentage that works, whatever you have been told. The rate that makes sense depends on what the machine cost, how it is financed, what maintenance and insurance run to, how long you will keep it, what it is worth when you sell it, and how many days a year it is actually on hire.
The calculator works backwards from those figures to the lowest rate that still clears the return you want, then suggests a rate above it that leaves you some room.
How do I know if a machine is paying for itself?
Your accounts show one profit figure for the whole business, so a strong machine can hide a weak one indefinitely. Modelling a single unit on its own gives you two things the company P&L cannot: its return on investment per year, and the month its cumulative cash turns positive.
If that month falls after the point you plan to sell the machine, it never pays for itself.
What utilisation rate should I be targeting?
Utilisation on its own does not tell you much, because a busy machine on a poor rate still loses money. What matters is the pair together. The what-if grid shows the return at several rates crossed with several utilisation levels, so instead of chasing a single benchmark you can see which combinations actually work for the machine in front of you.
Should I buy the machine or keep hiring it in?
Compare the payback month and the lifetime return against what hiring in would cost you over the same period. If a machine only pays back in month 55 of a 60 month life, ownership is carrying nearly all of the risk for a very thin reward — and any drop in utilisation wipes it out.
Do I need accounting knowledge to use this?
No, and that is the point of it. You enter what the machine costs, what you plan to charge and how busy you expect it to be. Depreciation, financing, overhead, tax and resale are handled for you.
The answer arrives as four plain pass-or-fail checks. The profit & loss, balance sheet and cashflow sit underneath if you want them, but you do not have to read a single one.
Is it really free? What is the catch?
It is free, there is no account, and there is no email wall in front of the result. You only give an email address if you want the full PDF report sent to you. We built the model for our own use and it costs us almost nothing to let other people use it.
Do you store the numbers I type in?
No. The calculator runs entirely in your browser and nothing is sent anywhere while you work. There are two exceptions, both of which you choose. The chat assistant reads the figures on screen when you send it a message, so it can answer about your deal instead of asking you to retype everything, and we keep those conversations for 90 days before they are deleted automatically. And if you ask for the PDF report, your inputs and results are sent so we can build the file, and we keep a copy of that report so we can answer questions about it. It is never shared with anyone.
Which currencies does it support?
Forty, converted at live exchange rates. The base figures are held exactly, so switching between currencies and back never drifts the numbers.
Last reviewed: 19 August 2026