How it works
A rate card built from your own costs
A roll-off rental has three costs that move with the job — the truck, the landfill and the time the box is out — plus a few small ones. Price the base rental to cover them at your target margin, and price the overage tons and the extra days at the same margin, so the heavy and slow rentals do not quietly give it back.
How to calculate it by hand
Haul = trips × cost per trip
Disposal = included tons × disposal cost per ton
Box time = included days × box cost per day
Direct cost = haul + disposal + box time + other direct cost
Base price = direct cost ÷ (1 − target margin)
Overage per ton = disposal per ton ÷ (1 − target margin)
Extra-day fee, at least = box cost per day ÷ (1 − target margin)
With the example numbers: two trips at $135 is $270 of haul. 3 tons included at a $65 tipping fee is $195 of disposal. 7 days at $11 a day is $77 of box time. With $40 of other cost, the direct cost is $582.00. At a 35% target, $582 ÷ 0.65 = $895.39. Overage is $65 ÷ 0.65 = $100.00 a ton, and the extra-day floor is $11 ÷ 0.65 = $16.93. Charging $795 today would be a 26.8% margin.
Working out the inputs
- Cost per trip is the driver’s loaded hourly cost plus the truck’s hourly cost (fuel, payment or depreciation, insurance, maintenance), times the hours a typical run takes — including the drive to the landfill on the pick-up.
- Box cost per day is what owning the container costs in a year — payment or depreciation, repairs, paint, yard space — divided by the days it is actually out on rent. A box that sits in the yard half the year costs twice as much per rented day as one that is always out.
- Disposal per ton is the tipping fee where you dump, for that kind of debris.
Common mistakes
- One price for every debris type. Concrete, roofing and dirt fill a box by weight long before they fill it by volume. Price heavy debris with its own tonnage.
- Overage at cost. Charging the tipping fee for extra tons means every heavy load earns less than a light one.
- Extension fees below box cost. If a day on site costs you more than you charge for it, a slow customer is a loss.
- Free dry runs. A trip where the box cannot be placed or cannot be picked up costs the same as one where it can.
- Divided by the wrong days. Box cost spread over 365 days, when the box is only rented for 180 of them, halves the real cost.
What good data looks like
Scale tickets on every return, recorded against the rental they belong to. Placed and returned dates on every box. Trip times from the board rather than memory. With a few months of that, the included tons and days on the rate card can be set from what your customers actually do.