Garden and DIY, buy or hire
Buy or hire? The break even for common tools
Almost every tool in a shed is used a handful of times a year, and that single fact decides the whole question. Hiring looks expensive because you see the price. Buying looks cheap because you only see it once.
Some links on this page are affiliate links, which earn us a commission if you buy. It costs you nothing extra, and it never changes which option comes out cheapest here, because the ranking is arithmetic. How this works.
The shape of the question
A hired tool costs the same every time you use it. A bought tool costs a lot once and then almost nothing. Those two lines cross at a specific number of uses, and that number is the entire answer.
| Option | Running | Cost per use | Relative |
|---|---|---|---|
| Buy a pressure washer£150, eight years | £1.15 | £4.28 | |
| Hire a pressure washer£22 a day | £23.15 | £23.15 |
At six uses a year a bought pressure washer costs £4.28 a use against £23.15 to hire one. The machine is ahead almost immediately, because £150 is only about seven days of hire.
Where the lines cross
| Times used | Hire at £22 a day | Buy at £150 | Cheaper |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | £23 | £151 | Hire at £22 a day |
| 2 | £46 | £152 | Hire at £22 a day |
| 4 | £93 | £155 | Hire at £22 a day |
| 7 | £162 | £158 | Buy at £150 |
| 10 | £232 | £162 | Buy at £150 |
| 20 | £463 | £173 | Buy at £150 |
| 48 | £1,111 | £205 | Buy at £150 |
Seven uses. That is the whole calculation for a pressure washer, and it is why almost nobody should hire one: seven uses is two summers of doing the patio and the car. The tools worth hiring are the ones where the purchase price is high and the plausible number of uses is genuinely tiny.
How many times will you honestly use it in the next five years. What does it cost to store, because a floor standing tool in a small flat is not free. And can you get it home, because hire charges assume a car and a Saturday morning you were not otherwise using.
Tools where hiring usually wins
Anything expensive, bulky and needed once. A floor sander is £40 to £55 a day and £600 to buy, so it takes a dozen uses to justify and almost nobody sands a dozen floors. The same goes for a scaffold tower, a wallpaper steamer used on one house, a cement mixer, and any tool where the professional version is genuinely different from the domestic one.
Tools where buying usually wins
Pressure washers, at about seven uses. Carpet cleaners at £25 a day against £180 to buy, so about seven uses, which a house with pets or small children reaches in two years. Tile cutters at £22 a day against £90, so four uses, and anybody tiling a bathroom will use one on at least two days anyway.
The cost nobody puts in the sum
Hire is a day, not an hour. You collect it, you rush the job because the clock is running, and you take it back. Buying means the job happens when it suits you and can be done badly on a Tuesday and finished properly at the weekend. That is worth something real, and it consistently pushes people towards buying tools they then use twice.
The verdict
Work out the break even before you go, because it is one division and it settles the argument. If the tool costs less than about eight days of hire, buy it. If it costs more than about fifteen, hire it unless you already know you will use it every year. And be honest about the number of uses, because that is the input everybody inflates and it is the only one that matters.
Put your own numbers in
Prefilled with a pressure washer. Set the uses a year to the honest number rather than the hopeful one.
Cost per meal
Set the purchase price to zero for the running cost alone.
Questions
Is it cheaper to buy or hire a pressure washer?
Buy, if you will use it more than about seven times. A £150 machine is roughly seven days of hire at £22 a day, and most people who want one use it at least twice a year.
How much does tool hire cost per day in the UK?
Around £22 a day for a pressure washer or tile cutter and about £25 for a carpet cleaner. Weekend rates from Friday to Monday are usually about one and a half times the day rate.
When is hiring a tool actually cheaper?
When the tool is expensive and you genuinely need it once. A floor sander is around £600 to buy and £40 to £55 a day to hire, so it takes about a dozen uses to justify buying one.
What is the break even for buying a carpet cleaner?
About eight uses. Hire is roughly £25 a day and a domestic machine is around £180, which a household with pets or small children will pass inside two years.
Does storage count as a cost?
It should. A bulky tool used twice a year occupies space permanently, and in a flat or a small garage that is a real cost even though no money changes hands.
Related
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- Cost per kilo: what home grown veg really costsWhat it actually costs to grow vegetables at home in the UK, per kilo, once seed, compost and water are counted, against the supermarket price.
- Cost per litre: tap, filter jug and bottled waterWhat a litre of drinking water costs in the UK from the tap, through a filter jug, and out of a bottle. The gap is larger than almost anyone guesses.
More garden and diy costs, or read how we work these out.
Prices used on this page
- Electricity, 26.11p per kWh. Ofgem price cap, direct debit, average of England, Scotland and Wales, including 5% VAT.. Ofgem energy price cap unit rates and standing charges. Checked 22 August 2026.