Equipment Cost Per Hour Calculator

Your machine costs you money every hour it runs, even when no one is looking. The equipment cost per operating hour adds up what the machine loses in value (depreciation) plus what it burns through (fuel, lubricants, maintenance, and any loan payment), then divides by the hours you actually run it. Add this number to your labor rate so every bid recovers the true cost of the iron.

depreciation/hr = (purchasePrice − salvageValue) / lifeHours   (straight-line)
fuel/hr         = fuelBurn × fuelPrice                          ($/gal × gal/hr)
lubricant/hr    = fuel/hr × lubricantPct                        (optional; FAO 5–10%)
maintenance/hr  = annualMaintenance / annualHours
finance/hr      = (monthlyPayment × 12) / annualHours           (optional)

total/hr        = depreciation + fuel + lubricant + maintenance + finance

per week        = total/hr × weekly hours    (annualHours ÷ 50 unless set)
per year        = total/hr × annualHours

Why straight-line. Straight-line depreciation spreads the machine's loss in value evenly across its useful life in hours. It is the standard for small lawn and field-service equipment and the easiest to explain to a customer. Declining-balance (where a machine loses 40–50% of its value in the first quarter of life, per FAO) is more accurate but harder to explain, so it is a documented caveat, not a mode here.

Editable defaults. Picking an equipment type pre-fills starting-point figures, but fuel price, life-hours, maintenance, and salvage all drift and vary widely: treat every default as a starting point and paste your own numbers. Salvage defaults to $0 (conservative); the FAO 10–20% band midpoint of 15% is offered as a one-tap quick-fill.

Snow equipment. The truck and plow, skid steer and wheel loader presets fill purchase price, life-hours, fuel burn and annual maintenance with round starting points so the worksheet computes at once. They are not market prices or manufacturer specs, and plow rigs, attachments and fuel use vary widely, so overwrite all four with your own machine. Snow machines also run a short season: put the hours the machine actually runs in a winter into Hours used, because maintenance and any loan payment are spread over those hours. Depreciation is spread over life-hours, so it does not change with the season length. If the machine will age out in years before it reaches its life-hours, switch Life to years × hours/year and enter your seasonal hours. On Per year, a snow preset leaves out the weekly figure, because spreading one winter's hours over 50 weeks would understate what a working week in season costs.

This is a pricing estimate, not a tax-depreciation schedule (IRS MACRS differs and is out of scope), and it stores nothing: no saved asset register, hour-meter feed, or maintenance schedule. It is a one-off worksheet built from the numbers you enter now.

Sources: FAO machine-rate manual (straight-line depreciation, salvage 10–20%, lubricants 5–10% of fuel); Sourcetable's cost-per-hour formula and $75/hr worked example; GUS equipment cost calculator (lawn-operator input set + itemized breakdown).

An hourly machine cost is an input, not a price. Feed it into the recurring mowing rate you quote so the mower, trimmer and truck are all recovered inside the visit, and into the acreage price behind a tractor and rotary cutter, where the machine line dominates the job rather than riding alongside labor. It is also the number that makes an autonomous mower's payback against a crew arguable rather than a guess.