Custom Truck sees record rental fleet growth
- Custom Truck One Source said its specialty rental fleet hit a company record in early May, as utility transmission and distribution work kept demand unusually strong. - The fleet now totals about 10,400 units and $1.66 billion of equipment cost, with roughly 75% tied to utility jobs like bucket trucks. - That matters because backlog stretched to 4.5 months and management says project visibility now runs into 2027.
Utility truck rentals are having a moment — and not the quiet, boring kind. Custom Truck One Source just said its rental fleet has reached the biggest level in company history because utilities are booking specialized gear faster than the company can cycle it back. The immediate story is about one equipment supplier. But the real signal is broader: power-grid work is staying busy enough that cranes, bucket trucks, digger derricks, and stringing gear are getting harder to source on short notice. ### What does Custom Truck actually rent? Custom Truck One Source sits in a pretty specific corner of infrastructure. It supplies specialty trucks and related equipment to electric utilities, telecom, rail, and other field-heavy industries. The utility side is the center of gravity here — especially transmission and distribution work, which is the gear-intensive business of building, upgrading, and maintaining the lines and poles that move electricity around. (investors.customtruck.com) ### What changed this time? The company said its Specialty Equipment Rental fleet has grown to about 10,400 units, representing roughly $1.66 billion of capital at quarter end — both records for the business. Management tied that growth directly to utility demand, not some one-off fleet reshuffle. The mix matters too: about 75% of that fleet is utility equipment, mostly aimed at transmission and distribution jobs. (investors.customtruck.com) ### Why are utilities pulling so much equipment? Because the grid is in one of those messy upgrade cycles where everything stacks up at once. Utilities are expanding transmission, hardening local distribution systems, connecting new generation, and dealing with the maintenance backlog that builds when projects get delayed. That kind of work needs specialized trucks in the field, and there are only so many available at any given time. Custom Truck said transmission-side visibility is the strongest it has been in a long time. (finance.yahoo.com) ### Which machines are getting squeezed? The big ones are the obvious utility workhorses — bucket trucks, digger derricks, boom trucks, cranes, and stringing gear. These are not generic rental pickups you can swap out at the last minute. A digger derrick does pole-setting and drilling. A bucket truck gets crews up on lines. Stringing gear handles conductor installation. If one piece is missing, the whole work sequence can stall. (marketbeat.com) ### How tight is the market? Tighter than the headline number alone suggests. Custom Truck said backlog reached 4.5 months at the end of the first quarter and had already moved higher in the second quarter. That means demand is not just strong in a single reporting period — jobs are lining up far enough out that the company can see starts extending into 2027. For project teams, that is the useful clue. Availability risk is becoming a planning problem, not just a procurement nuisance. (finance.yahoo.com) ### Is this showing up in the company’s results? Yes — pretty clearly. First-quarter 2026 revenue hit a record $461.6 million, up 9.3% from a year earlier, while adjusted EBITDA rose 33.4% to $98.0 million. The rental business was a major driver, helped by higher equipment utilization and a larger amount of fleet on rent. Management raised full-year 2026 adjusted EBITDA guidance to $415 million to $440 million from $410 million to $435 million. (marketbeat.com) ### What does this mean for contractors and utilities? Basically, don’t assume the truck shows up just because the project got approved. When fleets are this full, schedule slack disappears. A delayed permit, a crew shift, or a weather miss can push a job into a period when the exact truck class you need is already committed somewhere else. The catch is that specialty utility jobs often need several machine types to arrive in sequence — like a relay race where one missing runner stops the baton cold. (investors.customtruck.com) ### So what’s the bottom line? This is a rental-fleet story on the surface, but really it is a grid-buildout story. Custom Truck’s record fleet size says utility work is staying hot enough to keep specialized equipment booked deep into the pipeline. If you build or maintain power infrastructure, early reservation windows are starting to matter almost as much as the work itself. (marketbeat.com)
