United Rentals

United Rentals is the largest equipment rental company in North America, founded in 1997 and headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut. It rents aerial lifts, earthmoving gear, forklifts and tools from locations in 49 states and 10 Canadian provinces, and its specialty segment covers trench safety, power and HVAC, fluid solutions, mobile storage and matting. Contractors and industrial plants are its core customers. In its third-quarter 2026 results, United Rentals reported specialty rental revenue up 34.7% while its general fleet grew 8.8%, and it raised 2026 guidance, pointing to momentum in large projects. That split says a lot about where contractors are spending.

The branch count is the number that shapes how a contractor actually uses this company: 1,665 rental locations across North America, plus 44 in Europe, 47 in Australia and 18 in New Zealand, staffed by roughly 28,100 employees. For a multi-site job, that density is the difference between a lift arriving the same morning and a crew standing down.

Behind the counter sit more than 3,300 equipment and tool classes. The general fleet covers aerial work platforms, earthmoving, forklifts, compaction and paving. Specialty Solutions is where the less obvious inventory lives: commercial trucks, flooring and facility solutions, power and HVAC, climate solutions, fluid solutions, trench safety and shoring, reliable onsite services, tool solutions, storage containers and mobile offices, communications and industrial blinds. Temporary industrial tents, ground protection matting, portable restrooms and two-way radio kit are all rentable items rather than things a site has to source separately.

Trench safety deserves its own mention because it is rented as a service line with shoring rather than as loose equipment, which matters on any excavation where the competent-person requirement is doing real work.

Two parts of the offer are not equipment at all. Total Control is fleet management software, bundled with a mobile app, notifications, benchmarking, the Wedge tool and downloadable catalogs, aimed at the problem of knowing what is on hire where. United Academy provides training. And the service arm works on equipment a customer already owns, not only on rented units, so a fleet-owning contractor can use the branch network as a maintenance network.

The company is headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut and describes itself as the largest equipment rental company in the world.