Where the numbers come from
The primary source is live Texas rate listings that aggregate offers from dozens of rental companies and publish day, week and four-week prices per equipment class. We cross-check against published national rate guides and against the terms pages of the large national suppliers for fees.
Every band in our data carries the source it came from, the date it was last verified and a confidence level. A build check fails if any figure is older than 180 days, so stale pricing cannot quietly ship.
Why everything is a range
We are describing a market we do not control. The low end is roughly what a well-supplied yard charges on a quiet week; the high end is what a scarce machine costs in a busy one. A single number would be false precision, and the honest form of the answer is the spread.
The duration model, and a correction
A widely repeated rule of thumb says a rental week costs three day rates and a month costs nine. The Texas listing data does not support it. Measured across every class we track, a week costs about 2.4 day rates and four weeks about 2.2 weekly rates, roughly 5.2 day rates for a month.
Building on the 9x rule would overstate a four-week quote by around 75%. We use the ratios the listings actually show, and only ever to interpolate a band a source does not publish, never to override a listed rate.
Metro adjustments, and where we refuse to make one
Houston and Austin sit at the Texas average. Dallas runs about 15% above it, and San Antonio and Fort Worth about 20% above. Those five metros get an adjustment.
Everywhere else does not, deliberately. Below the largest metros the rate sampling is thin enough that a handful of listings in a given week can make one suburb look 40% more expensive than the city next to it. Publishing that as a local rate would be inventing a market. Those cities quote the statewide band, and the pages say so.
What the estimate excludes
Fuel and the transport surcharge most suppliers index to the diesel price. An operator and any rigging crew. Permits, street closures and traffic control. After-hours or weekend delivery. Damage, cleaning and late-return charges.
The assumptions panel under the estimator lists all of it on the page rather than in a tooltip, because a contractor who can see what the number assumes can tell us what is different about their job.
What we will not price at all
Cranes are billed by the hour against a minimum, with mobilization charged separately each way, and larger machines are often bare-rented by the month. A day rate for a crane would be an invention rather than an estimate, so we show the basis they are actually quoted on.
Bucket and boom trucks are worse: every published source we found disagrees with every other one, sometimes by a factor of three at the same working height. They are quoted by hand.