On the desk today · United Rentals
You don't buy a crane for a three-month job. You rent one. One company owns more of them than anyone.
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The Fleet That Never
Stops Earning
In September 1997, a man named Bradley Jacobs sold his waste hauling company — United Waste Systems — for $2.2 billion. Most people would have stopped there. Jacobs took $45 million of his proceeds, recruited the same management team, and walked into the equipment rental industry with one idea: buy every small rental shop he could find.
The equipment rental market in 1997 was wildly fragmented — thousands of family-owned shops, each with a few dozen pieces of equipment parked in a yard. No national brand. No scale. No technology. Jacobs saw exactly what he had seen in waste hauling: an industry waiting to be rolled up.
He founded United Rentals in Greenwich, Connecticut, made his first six acquisitions in October 1997, and went public two months later. Within three years, he had purchased hundreds of operators and built the largest equipment rental company in North America.
I drove past a construction site last week — one of those highway overpass projects that seems to take forever. I counted the machines. A boom lift. Two excavators. A portable generator. A light tower. A skid steer. Not one of those machines was owned by the contractor working the site. Every piece was rented. And there is a very good chance every piece came from the same company.
Most people don't think about who owns the crane on the job site. But here is the logic. A crane costs $500,000. A highway project lasts three months. Nobody buys a $500,000 machine for three months of work. You rent it. When the job is done, the crane goes back on the truck — and within days, it's earning rent on another site for another customer. The machine never sits idle for long. The fleet keeps earning.
United Rentals is the largest equipment rental company in the world. It operates 1,768 branches across four continents — 49 U.S. states, every Canadian province, and locations in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. It rents everything from aerial work platforms and earthmoving equipment to generators, trench safety gear, and traffic control systems. The fleet, valued at approximately $22.5 billion at original equipment cost, is the largest on the planet.
In fiscal 2025, United Rentals reported $16.1 billion in total revenue — a record. Rental revenue alone was $13.8 billion, up 6%. Adjusted EBITDA hit $7.3 billion at a 45.5% margin. Net income was $2.5 billion. The company generated $5.2 billion in operating cash flow and returned $1.9 billion to shareholders through buybacks. It employs approximately 28,500 people. And it opened 60 new specialty branches during the year — focused on niche categories like climate control, power, and industrial tools.
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That $22.5 billion fleet is the moat. No competitor has anything close. The second-largest player has roughly a third of United Rentals' market share. And the gap keeps widening — because scale in equipment rental works like route density in waste hauling. The more branches you have, the closer you are to every job site. The closer you are, the faster the delivery. The faster the delivery, the more contractors call you first. United Rentals can get a boom lift to a job site by 7 a.m. A small local competitor might take two days. When a contractor is paying a crew to stand around, those hours matter.
The pricing power lives in urgency. Equipment rental is not a market where customers shop around. A pipe bursts and the utility needs a pump. A hurricane hits and FEMA needs generators. A bridge project starts Monday and the contractor needs three excavators by Friday. The customer calls the company that can deliver — and United Rentals, with 1,768 branches and a $22.5 billion fleet, can deliver nearly anything, nearly anywhere, nearly immediately. In fiscal 2025, fleet productivity — a metric that combines rental rates, utilization, and mix — increased 2.2% for the full year. Rates rose. Utilization held. The fleet kept earning.
The company's annual report put it plainly: "This translated into working with our customers to provide an unmatched experience across our one-stop-shop of general rental and specialty products and services, coupled with industry-leading technology and a world-class team." What that sentence doesn't say — but the numbers do — is that United Rentals generated $5.2 billion in cash from operations and deployed $4.2 billion in gross fleet purchases. It takes money to make money in equipment rental. The capital intensity is the barrier. The cash flow is the reward.
The flywheel is the fleet itself. United Rentals buys a piece of equipment — say, a $150,000 excavator. It rents the machine out, earning revenue for five to seven years. When the machine ages, the company sells it on the used market — recovering roughly 50% of the original cost. Then it uses that cash, plus the rental income, to buy a newer machine. The cycle repeats. In the fourth quarter of 2025, United Rentals recovered 50.2% on the fleet it sold. Half the capital comes back. The machine has already earned years of rental income. The used sale is the bonus.
WHY THIS WORKS
Nobody buys a crane. A contractor doesn't own the equipment — they rent it for the duration of the project. When the job ends, the machine earns rent somewhere else. The fleet never retires.
Scale is the moat. 1,768 branches, $22.5 billion in fleet, 28,500 employees. No competitor comes close. The nearest rival has roughly a third of United Rentals' share. Scale means faster delivery, broader selection, and better rates.
Urgency kills price sensitivity. When a project can't start until the equipment arrives, the contractor pays what it costs. Equipment rental is not a market where customers comparison-shop for days.
The fleet pays for itself twice. Rental income covers the cost over five to seven years. Then the machine is sold on the used market at roughly 50% of original cost. Capital comes back. The cycle compounds.
Bradley Jacobs left United Rentals in 2007. He went on to found XPO Logistics — another roll-up, this time in trucking — and built it into a $16 billion company before spinning off parts of it in 2022. The playbook was always the same: find a fragmented industry, buy the operators, integrate the fleet, and own the market. But the original — the equipment rental roll-up — may be the purest version. A $45 million bet in 1997 created a company that now generates $16 billion in revenue, employs 28,500 people, and owns enough equipment to stock every construction site in America. The crane doesn't care who runs the company. It just goes where the invoice sends it.
