Alta Equipment Drops 1.4 Percent in Q2 Revenue; Rental Revenue Skids 13.8 Percent
Alta Equipment posted $481.2 million in total revenue in the second quarter of 2025, compared to $488.1 million, a small drop of 1.4 percent. Rental revenue declined from $53.7 million to $46.3 million, a 13.8-percent dip. New and used equipment sales increased from $251.5 million to $265.6 million, a 5.6-percent increase.
For the first six months of 2025, Alta Equipment’s total revenue was $904.2 million compared to $929.7 million in the first half of 2024, a 2.7-percent decline. Rental revenues were $88.6 million, compared to $102.2 million in last year’s first half, a 13.3-percent plunge. New and used equipment sales increased from $480.1 million to $487.3 million, a 1.5-percent increase.
Service revenues were $131 million compared to $130.2 million for the first half of last year, essentially flat.
“Our business, as expected, produced a notable sequential increase from the first quarter results as our customer base launched into the construction season in our northern regions,” said Ryan Greenawalt, Alta CEO. “We are particularly pleased with our second quarter performance given the broader uncertainty driven by evolving trade policies and tariffs, which were introduced at a macro level toward the start of the quarter. Specifically, our Construction Equipment segment’s exposure to federal and state DOT infrastructure projects and the aggregate and mining industries continues to help provide our business with reliable demand in this environment as we realize share gains in a generally stable demand backdrop for heavy earthmoving machines.
“In our Material Handling business, while revenues were up slightly on a sequential basis, market hesitancy related to tariffs and regional softness in the Midwest and Canada contributed to year-over-year declines in our product support and rental departments. That said, our equipment sales pipeline in our Material Handling segment remains stable relative to historical levels, and we expect will remain healthy for the balance of the year. Finally, while the majority of our business has been relatively insulated from the direct impact of tariffs, as a direct importer of equipment, our Ecoverse business (e.g. Master Distribution segment) experienced margin pressure year over year in the quarter due to tariffs imposed on European imports. Despite the margin pullback, we are encouraged by the increased demand for environmental processing equipment and remain optimistic that a more stable trade relationship between the United States and the European Union going forward will support a return to normalized margins.”
In regard to financial performance, Greenawalt said: “Our targeted initiatives to optimize operations yielded meaningful results in the quarter as we achieved improvements in service gross margin and realized a $12.2 million reduction in SG&A from a year ago. Lastly, we continue to review and right-size our rental fleet levels, to align market demand from our customers for rental equipment with the appropriate amount of supply to ultimately drive utilization and returns on invested capital. As part of this strategy, we reduced the original equipment cost of our rental fleet nearly $50 million from a year ago.”
Alta Equipment, based in Livonia, Mich., is No. 26 on the RER 100.
About the Author
Michael Roth
Editor
Michael Roth has covered the equipment rental industry full time for RER since 1989 and has served as the magazine’s editor in chief since 1994. He has nearly 30 years experience as a professional journalist. Roth has visited hundreds of rental centers and industry manufacturers, written hundreds of feature stories for RER and thousands of news stories for the magazine and its electronic newsletter RER Reports. Roth has interviewed leading executives for most of the industry’s largest rental companies and manufacturers as well as hundreds of smaller independent companies. He has visited with and reported on rental companies and manufacturers in Europe, Central America and Asia as well as Mexico, Canada and the United States. Roth was co-founder of RER Reports, the industry’s first weekly newsletter, which began as a fax newsletter in 1996, and later became an online newsletter. Roth has spoken at conventions sponsored by the American Rental Association, Associated Equipment Distributors, California Rental Association and other industry events and has spoken before industry groups in several countries. He lives and works in Los Angeles when he’s not traveling to cover industry events.