Rent or buy is the wrong question. The real one is how many months a year that machine will actually be working.
Both options are defensible. What decides between them is utilisation, and utilisation is something you can estimate honestly from your own programme before anybody quotes you a purchase price.
In short
- Start from the annual hire cost. A 20-tonne crawler excavator hires at 16,000-20,000 a month in Riyadh, so a full year of hire is roughly 192,000-240,000 SAR.
- Owning adds costs that hire does not have: finance, maintenance, insurance, yard space, the operator on your payroll, and the resale you cannot predict.
- Four weeks cost more than a month. A 20-tonne excavator quotes 4,000-5,250 a week against 16,000-20,000 a month.
- Own the machine you always need; hire the one you sometimes need.
Start with what a year of hire actually costs
Before any ownership case can be argued, you need the number it has to beat. These are Riyadh monthly figures multiplied by twelve: the most a machine of that size would cost you if you hired it every month of the year:
| Machine and size | Per month, SAR | Twelve months, SAR | How often quoted |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crawler excavator, 20 t | 16,000-20,000 | 192,000-240,000 | Most quoted |
| Backhoe loader, 74-109 hp | 12,375-15,000 | 148,500-180,000 | Most quoted |
| All-terrain crane, 50 t | 22,000-25,000 | 264,000-300,000 | Most quoted |
| Forklift, 10 t | 13,000-16,125 | 156,000-193,500 | Most quoted |
| Motor grader, 12-14 ft | 23,250-27,000 | 279,000-324,000 | Often quoted |
| Wheel loader, 5 m³ | 15,000-18,000 | 180,000-216,000 | Often quoted |
Now halve it, and halve it again
Almost no machine works twelve months a year. At six months of real work, the excavator above costs 96,000-120,000 a year to hire; at three, 48,000-60,000. That is the figure ownership has to beat, not the twelve-month one, and not the daily rate multiplied by a wish.
What ownership adds that hire does not have
The purchase price is the smallest question, because it is the one everybody already asks. The rest of the list is where owned fleets get expensive:
- Finance. Capital committed to a machine is capital not available for mobilisation, payroll or the next tender.
- Maintenance and downtime. Yours to schedule, yours to pay for, and yours to absorb when it happens mid-programme.
- The operator. On hire this is often somebody else's employee: in our data, 85% of quotes for a 20-tonne excavator and 92% for a backhoe loader include an operator. Owned, that person is on your payroll in the idle months too.
- Yard, insurance, registration, transport between your own sites.
- Resale. A number nobody can promise you today.
The trap in short hires: four weeks is not a month
Where a machine is quoted by both periods, the weekly rate does not scale the way people assume:
| Machine | Per week, SAR | Per month, SAR |
|---|---|---|
| Crawler excavator, 20 t | 4,000-5,250 | 16,000-20,000 |
| All-terrain crane, 50 t | 2,750-11,500 | 22,000-25,000 |
Four weeks of the excavator lands at or above the monthly price, before the extra transport a broken hire can attract. If the job is close to a month, ask for the month.
How to decide, in four steps
- Count the months. Go through next year's programme and mark the months this machine is genuinely committed. Be honest; the optimistic version of this list is what buys idle machines.
- Price the hire. Months on the list x the monthly range for that size, from the rental rates page.
- Build the ownership case against that. Purchase, finance, maintenance, insurance, yard, operator, transport, minus a resale figure you would still accept if it came in 30% lower.
- Decide per machine, not per fleet. Most contractors end up owning the machine that is on every job and hiring the one that is on one job a quarter.
One practical note on the hire side: the deeper the market for a size, the safer it is to rely on hiring it. The 20-tonne excavator is quoted more often than any other size; a D9 dozer only rarely. A machine you can always find is a machine you do not need to own.
See how a request works when you want the hire side priced properly.
Source: Moedatech platform data. The published ranges rest on 13,820+ supplier quotes given on the platform between April and August 2026. Figures on this page are Riyadh unless stated, in Saudi riyals, excluding VAT. A quote count in a table is the number of offers received for that one machine size in that period; it is not a measure of how many suppliers or machines are on the platform, which the company publishes separately. Operator share and mobilisation are medians across the quotes for that size, and a price range is the middle half of them, so a quarter of offers sit below it and a quarter above.
