Compare buying against renting and manual labour over five years. See your payback period, a full depreciation schedule and the net saving, so you commit the capital with your eyes open.
Takes ~3 minutes · All figures stay in your browser until you choose to share them
Buy vs Rent vs Labour
Compare the real options
Payback Period
When it pays for itself
Depreciation Schedule
Book value year by year
Net 5-Year Saving
The number that matters
Every trades and services business hits the same fork: keep hiring the gear job by job, keep doing it the slow manual way, or bite the bullet and buy your own. It feels like it should be a simple sum, but the buy option hides its costs — depreciation, maintenance, the capital tied up — while the hire and labour options bleed money quietly in weekly amounts you never total up. The Tool and Equipment ROI Calculator is a plain-English decision tool that puts all three options side by side over a five-year horizon, so you commit real capital with your eyes open rather than on a gut feel.
You enter the equipment's purchase price, how long you expect it to last, an annual maintenance figure as a percentage of price, and the details of how you get the job done today — a daily hire rate and the jobs it supports each week, the extra manual labour hours and your labour rate, or both. From those inputs it works out your annual cost to own (straight-line depreciation plus maintenance) and compares it against the annual cost of your current method. It then returns the payback period — how long owning takes to recover the purchase price through the savings — a year-by-year cost comparison for each option you actually use, a full straight-line depreciation schedule showing book value declining each year, and the net five-year saving. It also flags whether the asset might qualify for an immediate deduction and points you to the current ATO instant asset write-off rules, without baking in a threshold, because those figures change from year to year and depend on when the asset is first used. Everything runs on your own numbers and stays in your browser until you choose to share it.
Australian tradies, builders and services businesses weighing up whether to buy a significant piece of gear or keep hiring it and doing the work manually.
The short answers are here. For anything else, ask below or get in touch.
It depends on how often you use it and what hiring costs you. As a rule of thumb, the more frequently a job needs the gear, the faster owning it pays off; occasional or one-off needs usually favour hiring. The calculator settles the maths for your situation by comparing your annual cost to own against your actual hire and labour spend, then showing the payback period and the net five-year difference. On cost alone it will tell you which way it leans — but weigh convenience, availability and the extra jobs owning the gear lets you say yes to.
These tools work together to give you a clearer picture of your business.
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Try it freeUse these results to make better decisions. If you'd like a second pair of eyes on them, an advisor can walk through what they mean for the business.
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