Buying or leasing a work truck

The transmission on your three-quarter-ton starts slipping on the way back from a job, somewhere past 200,000 miles. The shop quotes $4,100. A used truck with a service body is $34,000 at the dealer down the road, a new one starts in the high forties for a base regular cab and climbs fast from there, and the salesperson keeps steering you toward a lease payment that sounds smaller than either.

None of those numbers is comparable. One is a repair, one is a purchase price, one is a monthly payment on a truck you hand back. Put them on the same footing first: what does each cost per year, and who is holding the truck when it is worn out?

Buy new, buy used, or lease: what actually differs

Retail leases are built for commuters. TRAC leases — terminal rental adjustment clause leases, written by fleet lessors for commercial vehicles — are built for trucks that work. Find out which one you are being shown before you compare payments.

What a work truck costs in a year, before it earns a dime

The payment is not the cost. Here is a used $34,000 three-quarter-ton pickup, financed, run 18,000 miles a year by a one-truck contractor. Every figure is an example — swap in your own payment, insurance quote and pump price, all of which swing hard by state.

Divide by the days you actually work. At 230 working days that is $83 a day, and at six billable hours a day it is about $13.90 an hour that has to come back to you before the truck breaks even.

Run the same table for the lease you were quoted — payment, insurance, fuel, uncovered maintenance, a realistic overage charge — and compare annual totals, not monthly ones.

Job-site miles are where lease math breaks

A retail lease capped at 12,000 miles a year against a truck running 18,000 leaves 6,000 excess miles annually. At a typical per-mile overage charge, three years of that arrives as a single four-figure bill on the day you hand the keys back.

Wear-and-tear is the second bill. Return standards are written for a commuter car, and a work truck fails them in trade-specific ways: holes drilled for a rack, adhesive residue where a wrap came off, a scratched bed, a hitch that has actually pulled something. Read the return condition schedule, not the payment.

Buying inverts the problem. Nobody bills you for the miles, but you own the truck at 180,000 when the repairs start clustering. That cost is just as real — downtime and a rebuilt transmission instead of a return invoice.

Section 179 is a real lever, and the details change every year

Section 179 lets a business deduct the cost of qualifying equipment, including a work vehicle, in the year it is placed in service instead of spreading it over years of depreciation. On a truck that can be worth thousands. What is durable enough to plan around:

• Gross vehicle weight rating is the dividing line. Vehicles below a GVWR threshold are treated as passenger autos with a capped deduction. Heavier vehicles get more favorable treatment. Your GVWR is on the driver's door jamb sticker.
• Body style matters as much as weight. A pickup with a cargo bed of at least six feet that is not readily accessible from the cab, and a cargo van with no seating behind the driver, are treated differently from an SUV of the same weight.
• Business use has to be over half, and stay there. Drop below that in a later year and part of the deduction can be recaptured. Keep a mileage log; the IRS treats vehicles as listed property with real substantiation requirements.
• A true lease is not eligible, because you do not own the truck — including a TRAC lease, which counts as a true lease for federal tax purposes. You generally deduct the business-use share of the lease payments instead, and higher-value leased vehicles trigger an "inclusion amount" that trims that deduction. A lease with a nominal buyout may be treated as a purchase — ask before you assume.
• Taking Section 179 or bonus depreciation closes the standard-mileage-rate door on that vehicle. You are on actual expenses from then on.

No dollar caps, weight thresholds or bonus depreciation percentages appear above, on purpose: statute sets them, they move every year, and states do not all conform to the federal rules. Get the current federal figures from IRS Publication 946 and run your truck past a CPA before you sign, not in April. And do not let the deduction pick the truck: a tax break on a vehicle you did not need is still money out the door.

Lettering, wraps, and what a leased truck can carry

A wrapped truck parked in a driveway for three days is cheap advertising. Prices vary by market: door lettering with a name and phone number runs a few hundred dollars, a partial wrap on doors, bed sides and tailgate lands in the low four figures, and a full wrap is higher again depending on the body. Get two local quotes.

How long you will keep the truck decides which one to buy. A full wrap spread over eight years of ownership is cheap; the same wrap on a three-year lease is not, once you add removal and any adhesive damage the lessor charges for. Use a phone number you will still have in five years.

Put the $83 a day somewhere it changes a price

Truck cost is overhead, and overhead only comes back if it is inside the rate you charge. Two ways to load it — pick one, not both:

• Into the hourly rate. Add the truck's hourly share — $13.90 above — to the overhead you already recover per hour, and every estimate carries it.
• As a trip or mobilization charge, if your work is many short calls rather than multi-day jobs. A business running eight stops a day recovers truck cost per stop far more accurately than per hour.

Then check the result against the market. If the truck alone needs $14 an hour of your rate and that pushes it past what your area pays, the answer is a cheaper truck or more billable days, not a quiet decision to absorb it.

The risk is that the figure stays on the spreadsheet. Build the truck's share into the rates in your DoneQuote catalog — inside the hourly rate, or as its own trip charge line — and the number you calculated is the number that goes out, whether the job leaves as an estimate, a work order or an invoice.