Equipment rates per hour for skid steers, excavators and dozers

Rates and sources checked on October 24, 2026.

Contractors bidding a Connecticut town’s equipment contract in March 2026 asked $150 to $275 an hour, one outlier bid aside, for skid steers, mini excavators, ¾ to 1 cubic yard excavators and crawler dozers, with the operator, fuel, insurance and transport in the price. Public cost schedules from FEMA, Iowa DOT and Caltrans put the same machine classes at about $32 to $300 an hour for the machine and its fuel alone, and the space between those two numbers is the operator, overhead, travel and profit.

The figures below cover skid steers and compact track loaders, crawler excavators from the Cat 305 size up to the Cat 336 size, and crawler dozers from the D3 size up to the D8 size. Backhoes, wheel loaders and farm field work have separate rate pages.

Equipment rates per hour by machine and region

Machine, fuel, repairs and depreciation go in; the operator stays out. All three public schedules in the first table price a machine that way, because each was built to pay for, or budget, owning and running equipment on public work. They still disagree, mostly because each one prices a different reference machine.

Cost-recovery rates, machine with fuel, no operator:

Sources: FEMA 2025 Schedule of Equipment Rates, cost codes 8250–8254, 8280–8283, 8382 and 8540–8542 · Iowa DOT Schedule of Equipment Rates, FY 2027 · Caltrans Labor Surcharge and Equipment Rental Rates, effective Sep 1, 2026, classes HCECL, LDRCL, TRACC and TRACS.

Note: These are cost-recovery rates for public work, and Caltrans says its own rate likely sits below what a rental yard charges.

One wide spread sits in dozers. Iowa DOT puts every crawler dozer above 100 hp in one band, so a single Iowa figure sits beside a D5 and a D8 alike, while FEMA and Caltrans price each size separately. At the 330 to 336 size the two schedules price different machines, a current 330 GC at FEMA against a 336F at Caltrans. Read the Caltrans column as an older fleet: most of its rows are earlier model series, while FEMA’s reference machines are current models.

Bid sheets show what the same work sells for once an operator is on the seat.

Sources: Greenwich RFB #7949 bid tabulation · Roanoke County IFB #2025-008 bid tabulation.

One Greenwich contractor bid $650 for a skid steer, more than double every other bid on that line, so the skid steer row leaves it out. The Roanoke bids were opened in August 2024, before this year’s diesel prices, and its six bidders spread wider than any other source here.

Farm surveys price skid steers as rentals. Skid loader rental in Iowa’s 2026 custom rate survey runs $100 an hour at the median (range $80 to $120, 8 responses) with no operator, tractor or fuel. In Wisconsin’s 2025 survey the median is $80 and the average $67.50 (range $25 to $85, 4 responses) for machine rental with fuel. Both samples are small. How skid steer pricing moves with frame size and attachments is broken down on the skid steer and track loader hourly rate page.

Bid sheets size excavators two ways, by bucket in Connecticut and by Cat model in Virginia. Matching the machine to the dig comes before the rate, and the mini excavator hourly rate page and the excavator size guide with rent and buy costs work through each class.

Iowa farm operators price dozing by blade width, at a median of $16.50 per foot of blade per hour (average $17.55, range $12.00 to $22.50, 16 responses) with the operator and fuel included. At that median an 8-foot blade works out to $132 an hour, a 10-foot blade $165 and a 12-foot blade $198. Take the width from your operator’s manual, because blade options vary within one model; the dozer hourly rate guide for D3 to D6 machines sets those figures against each class.

Public schedules from other states sit on the equipment hourly rates by state page.

Wet, dry or operated: what each rate covers

A quoted rate can’t be compared with any other until you know what it includes. A dry rate pays for the machine alone, and you bring the fuel and the operator. Add fuel and it becomes a wet rate. An operated rate adds the person running the machine, and it’s the form most owner-operators quote a customer.

FEMA’s schedule is a wet rate with conditions. It covers depreciation, overhead, maintenance, field repairs, fuel, lubricants and tires, pays only while the machine is working, and leaves operator labor to be approved separately. Standby time isn’t eligible.

Public-works rates in California are built the same way: fuel, repairs, depreciation, storage and the cost of capital, with a 15% markup for overhead added on force-account work, the extra work an agency pays for by the hour.

Farm survey rates come built the other way round. Iowa State’s 2026 survey reports its rates with fuel and operator labor included unless a row says otherwise; its machinery rental rows exclude operator labor and fuel and assume you supply the tractor. The Greenwich bids were fully operated, transport to and from the site included.

On disaster work, the contract and FEMA decide which rate pays. Under 44 CFR § 206.228, an applicant’s state-approved rate of $75 an hour or less is used as set, and anything higher is reviewed by FEMA case by case. How contractors use the schedule outside disaster work is covered in using FEMA equipment rates as a pricing benchmark.

Why do contractor bids run double the public rates?

Add a median-wage operator to each public rate and you have a floor: the least an owner with average costs needs to bill per hour before overhead or profit.

The median annual wage for operating engineers and other construction equipment operators was $59,850 in May 2025. Spread over 2,080 paid hours, that comes to $28.77 an hour. Caltrans applies a 10% labor surcharge for statutory payroll items: workers’ compensation, Social Security, Medicare, federal and state unemployment insurance and state training tax. $28.77 × 1.10 = $31.65 an hour, worked out from those two sources.

That 10% is California’s figure, used here as a stated assumption, and it leaves out health benefits and overtime.

Each floor is the public rate in the first table plus the loaded operator cost worked out above, before overhead, travel or profit.

Set against those floors, the Greenwich skid steer bids run $58 to $133 an hour over FEMA’s S86-size floor. The mid-size excavator bids sit $60 to $120 above FEMA’s 320 GC floor. Dozers show how much the size class matters: the bids for a dozer up to 375 hp run $83 to $108 over the D6 floor, yet only $5 to $30 over the D8 floor, and that Greenwich line covers both sizes.

The difference pays for things the schedules leave out or average away. Caltrans itself adds the overhead markup above on top of its own rates. The Greenwich price also carries insurance and the move to the site, and a contractor bills only the hours the machine works; how many of those a year to plan on is covered in billable hours per year.

Every machine’s hour got dearer when diesel jumped

Caltrans changed one input between its April and September 2026 rate books, and every row in the table below rose 7% to 10%, rounded. In the September book, fuel costs went up while interest rates, the Producer Price Index, sales tax and freight stayed unchanged, so the difference between the two books is fuel.

Sources: Caltrans book effective April 1, 2026 and Caltrans book effective September 1, 2026. Increase = September rate minus April rate; percentages worked out from the two books.

Hourly fuel burn from Caterpillar’s machine telematics gives a second check. Multiply each machine’s gallons per hour by the year-over-year rise in diesel and you get the fuel cost the past twelve months added to its hour.

Sources: Caterpillar Performance Handbook fuel consumption tables, America North, December 2022 (load profiles assume 50% idle time at low load, falling to 10% at high load) · EIA Gasoline and Diesel Fuel Update, on-highway diesel. Added cost = gallons per hour × $2.656.

The two methods line up in size. The Caltrans rise for the 320C sits within 25 cents an hour of the Cat-based figure for a current 320, and the D-6R XL’s rise runs about $2 below the current D6 figure. They use different machines and different fuel prices, so they agree within a few dollars. Several of the current Cat machines also burn diesel exhaust fluid, at 2.5% of fuel on the 320 and 5% on the D6.

Where you buy fuel moves the number again. For the week of October 19, 2026, EIA’s on-highway diesel averages ran from $5.903 a gallon on the Gulf Coast to $6.352 in the Midwest, $7.394 on the West Coast and $8.242 in California, against a U.S. average of $6.276. Those prices include highway fuel taxes, so price your own hours from your fuel invoice. Each extra dollar a gallon adds the listed burn figure, in dollars, to every hour.

The Iowa custom rates above were built on diesel at $2.89 a gallon. At the Midwest price, a D6-size dozer at medium load burns $16.69 an hour more in fuel than the survey assumed (4.82 gal × $3.462 difference). Passing that through to customers is the job of a fuel surcharge on equipment work.

Your cost floor, built line by line

Floor equals what the machine costs to own and run per billed hour, plus what the operator costs per billed hour. The public rates stand in for the first half until you have your own numbers, and you replace them in this order:

1. Owning cost: depreciation (purchase price minus expected resale, over the years you’ll keep it), interest on the money tied up, insurance and storage, divided by the hours you bill. The split between this and running costs is set out in owning cost versus operating cost per hour.
2. Operating cost per engine hour: fuel at your burn rate and price, repairs, wear parts, and undercarriage on tracked machines.
3. Operator wage plus the payroll costs on it, from your own payroll records.
4. Overhead share: pickup, shop, office and insurance on the business, divided by billed hours.
5. Profit, set as a share of the price (margin) instead of a percentage added to cost (markup), because the two give different prices from the same cost.

Caltrans notes that certain equipment costs are fixed for the year however many hours a machine works, and the same holds in your books: fewer billed hours push the owning line up while fuel per hour stays put.

A low bid loses money below these numbers

Two of the six contractors who bid Roanoke County, Virginia’s equipment contract in August 2024 priced a D3-size dozer below every D3 floor above. Their $60 and $70 bids fall $35.83 and $25.83 an hour short of FEMA’s D3 floor, and $13.57 and $3.57 short of the Caltrans-based one.

The same sheet repeats the pattern. Cat 316-size excavator bids of $80 and $95 an hour sit $33.49 and $18.49 below the Iowa DOT floor for a 100 to 150 hp crawler excavator. Skid steer bids of $60 and $75 with attachments sit $16.88 and $1.88 below the FEMA-based floor for an S76-size skid steer, and that floor carries no attachment cost.

Mini excavators came closest. A $90 bid on a Cat 308-size machine sits $1.21 over the FEMA-based floor and $1.74 over the Caltrans one, before any overhead or profit; an $80 bid misses both by more than $8.

A bidder with a paid-off machine and no payroll can work below a schedule built on a newer reference machine, and these bids came in two years before this year’s diesel prices. For an owner whose costs look like the schedules, every hour billed at those rates loses money before travel is counted.

Before you quote: price from your own floor in the table above, then add your overhead and travel before any profit. A rate that only matches the floor earns nothing.

Minimums, mobilization and standby

Greenwich pays a minimum of four hours and pays straight time only. FEMA pays nothing for standby.

An idle machine on a Caltrans job is paid only on an excusable delay, through a delay factor that recovers ownership costs alone for up to eight hours a day and 40 hours a week. Each use needs the resident engineer’s approval.

Private jobs set these terms in the quote, and setting a mobilization fee and minimum charge works through both for excavator moves.

Renting a skid steer or hiring one

The Iowa rental median above excludes the operator and the fuel, while the Connecticut bids include both, plus transport. To compare them, add your own hours at the wage above and the skid steer’s burn at your diesel price to the rental figure, then add the haul.

The one number to look up before your next quote

Pull last year’s invoices and count the hours you billed on the machine you’re quoting. That figure divides every owning and overhead cost on the list above, so a short year raises your floor before fuel or wages move. Once you have it, set your own floor for the class and compare it with the bid sheet nearest your region.