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What this page is: Delvantic's full research page for United Rentals, Inc. (URI) — AI-driven forensic equity research: mechanical valuation models (DCF, EPV, anchored-PE, scenario) plus three independent AI lenses (Quality / Value / Sentiment). Everything below is rendered server-side; you are not missing content that requires JavaScript. All scores are predictions and research opinions, not financial advice.
Our current read (analysis of 2026-08-23): Designation Watch · Gem Score -13 (−100…+100 Quality+Value blend) · Quality 52 · Value -66 · Sentiment 44 (timing only, not weighted)
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United Rentals, Inc.
URI NYSEUnited Rentals, Inc. is an equipment rental company that supplies construction, industrial, and specialty equipment to customers across North America. United Rentals serves contractors, utilities, municipalities, manufacturers, and other businesses through a broad portfolio that includes aerial work platforms, forklifts, earthmoving machines, power and climate control equipment, and tools for jobsite support. The company also provides related services such as equipment protection and online rental management tools, helping customers access a wide range of machines without owning and maintaining them directly. Its operations are organized around general rentals and specialty rentals, giving it exposure to both everyday jobsite needs and more specialized project requirements. With a large branch network and a focus on fleet availability, United Rentals plays a central role in supporting construction, infrastructure, and industrial activity across the regional rental market.
Price Overview
Price History (1 Year)
Revenue & Net Income Trend
| Period | Revenue | Net Income | Net Margin | YoY/QoQ |
|---|
Key Metrics
EPS (Diluted): 38.61
Total Equity: $8.97B
Shares: 64,604,000
Total Debt: $15.88B
Cash: $459.00M
EBITDA: N/A
Total Debt: $15.88B
Cash: $459.00M
Revenue: $16.10B
Revenue: $16.10B
Revenue: $16.10B
Total Equity: $8.97B
Tax Rate: 25.3%
Equity: $8.97B
Total Debt: $15.88B
Cash: $459.00M
Current Liabilities: $3.82B
Long-Term Debt: $14.30B
Total Debt: $15.88B
Total Equity: $8.97B
Shares: 64,604,000
Shares: 64,604,000
CapEx: $0.00
Shares: 64,604,000
Stock Price: $1,150
Net Income: $2.49B
Industry Benchmarks
Income Statement (Annual)
Last updated: Aug 11, 2026 2:36pm (12d ago)| Metric | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $9.7B | $11.6B | $14.3B | $15.3B | $16.1B |
| Cost of Revenue | $5.9B | $6.6B | $8.5B | $9.2B | $10.0B |
| Gross Profit | $3.9B | $5.0B | $5.8B | $6.2B | $6.1B |
| Operating Expenses | $1.6B | $1.8B | $2.0B | $2.1B | $2.2B |
| Operating Income | $2.3B | $3.2B | $3.8B | $4.1B | $4.0B |
| Net Income | $1.4B | $2.1B | $2.4B | $2.6B | $2.5B |
| EBITDA | — | — | — | — | — |
| EPS | $19.14 | $29.77 | $35.40 | $38.82 | $38.71 |
| EPS (Diluted) | $19.04 | $29.65 | $35.28 | $38.69 | $38.61 |
Balance Sheet (Annual)
Last updated: Aug 11, 2026 12:27pm (12d ago)| Metric | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cash & Equivalents | $144.0M | $106.0M | $363.0M | $457.0M | $459.0M |
| Total Current Assets | $2.2B | $2.7B | $2.9B | $3.2B | $3.6B |
| Total Assets | $20.3B | $24.2B | $25.6B | $28.2B | $29.9B |
| Current Liabilities | $2.6B | $2.4B | $3.6B | $3.3B | $3.8B |
| Long-Term Debt | $9.8B | $11.4B | $11.6B | $13.5B | $14.3B |
| Total Liabilities | $14.3B | $17.1B | $17.5B | $19.5B | $20.9B |
| Total Equity | $6.0B | $7.1B | $8.1B | $8.6B | $9.0B |
| Retained Earnings | $7.6B | $9.7B | $11.7B | $13.8B | $15.8B |
Cash Flow (Annual)
Last updated: Aug 11, 2026 2:36pm (12d ago)| Metric | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Operating Cash Flow | $3.7B | $4.4B | $4.7B | $4.5B | $5.2B |
| Capital Expenditure | -$3.2B | -$3.7B | -$3.9B | -$4.1B | — |
| Free Cash Flow | $491.0M | $743.0M | $840.0M | $416.0M | — |
| Acquisitions (net) | -$1.4B | -$2.3B | -$574.0M | -$1.7B | -$357.0M |
| Net Debt Issued / (Repaid) | $8.4B | $9.9B | $8.6B | $11.6B | $11.2B |
| Dividends Paid | $0 | $0 | -$406.0M | -$434.0M | -$464.0M |
| Stock Buybacks | -$34.0M | -$1.1B | -$1.1B | -$1.6B | -$2.0B |
| Net Change in Cash | -$58.0M | -$38.0M | $257.0M | $94.0M | $2.0M |
Growth Trends (YoY %)
Last updated: Aug 11, 2026 2:36pm (12d ago)| Metric | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue Growth | +19.8% | +23.1% | +7.1% | +4.9% |
| Gross Profit Growth | +29.7% | +16.4% | +5.8% | -0.1% |
| Operating Income Growth | +41.9% | +18.4% | +6.2% | -2.3% |
| Net Income Growth | +51.9% | +15.2% | +6.2% | -3.1% |
| EBITDA Growth | — | — | — | — |
Dividend History (Last 20)
Last updated: Aug 11, 2026 12:27pm (12d ago)| Date | Dividend | Declaration | Record | Payment |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-05-13 | $1.97 | — | — | — |
| 2026-02-11 | $1.97 | — | — | — |
| 2025-11-12 | $1.79 | — | — | — |
| 2025-08-13 | $1.79 | — | — | — |
| 2025-05-14 | $1.79 | — | — | — |
| 2025-02-12 | $1.79 | — | — | — |
| 2024-11-13 | $1.63 | — | — | — |
| 2024-08-14 | $1.63 | — | — | — |
| 2024-05-07 | $1.63 | — | — | — |
| 2024-02-13 | $1.63 | — | — | — |
| 2023-11-07 | $1.48 | — | — | — |
| 2023-08-08 | $1.48 | — | — | — |
| 2023-05-09 | $1.48 | — | — | — |
| 2023-02-07 | $1.48 | — | — | — |
Deep Analysis
Narrative Economics
market-narrative step).
AI Lens 4th lens · how AI reaches this business · 5-yr
2026-08-11Data-center and semiconductor megaprojects driven by AI capex consume exactly URI's highest-margin specialty categories — mobile power, climate control, trench/pump, temporary electrical — where URI's national fleet and cross-branch redistribution let it serve single sites at a scale no regional competitor can match.
URI's revenue is levered to construction/industrial capex, so if AI-related buildout decelerates or shifts to prefabricated, less equipment-intensive delivery, the same channel that inflates growth reverses hard against a fleet bought at peak rates — visible first in fleet productivity and rental rate softening, as the 2021-2025 gross margin slide (39.7% to 38.2%) already hints.
Whether AI-era megaproject demand keeps time-utilization and rental rates firm enough to offset fleet cost inflation. Observable: quarterly fleet productivity split into rate vs. utilization, and specialty rental revenue growth versus general fleet.
Replacement-cost fleet scale, branch density with same-day delivery logistics, OEM allocation priority, national-account contracts, and the balance-sheet capacity to absorb cyclical fleet capex — none of which get cheaper when software gets cheaper.
AI Lens thesis
AI reaches URI through three narrow channels rather than the core: demand (AI infrastructure construction consumes specialty rental at unusually high intensity), operating cost (telematics-driven maintenance, dispatch routing, dynamic rate-setting, credit and collections automation against a labor-heavy branch and service-tech base), and sales productivity (agentic quoting through URI's own digital ordering). None of these touch the reason customers hire URI — access to physical capacity without owning it, plus the maintenance and liability that come with it. The monetized unit is machine-days on a jobsite; no amount of cheap inference produces a boom lift. The real AI-linked risk is second-order and cyclical: URI's fortunes ride the capex cycle that AI is currently inflating, which makes the upside real and the downside symmetric.
What the market may be underestimating
Upside URI monetizes uptime, not iron: AI-driven predictive maintenance on a telematics-instrumented fleet raises time utilization and extends useful life, which lifts returns on the same capital without any rate increase — a margin lever the market treats as a cyclical rate story.
Downside Autonomous and remotely-monitored equipment shifts value toward OEM software/data platforms; if manufacturers tie machine intelligence to direct-managed fleets or usage-based programs, URI risks becoming the balance sheet while someone else owns the jobsite data layer.
Outcome range spread 38
Claude Reading
The synthesis verdict of "$161 fair value vs $1,150 price" is arithmetically nonsense and I'd throw it out before engaging with it. URI earned $2.49B in 2025 on a $70.8B market cap — that's a 3.5% earnings yield, PE ~28x, EV/EBITDA in the low teens. A DCF spitting out $161 (implying ~$10B market cap, ~4x earnings) would require assuming imminent bankruptcy or negative terminal growth, neither of which the raw data supports. The composite model is broken, likely a share-count or per-share error, and the narrative layer's "614% premium to DCF" commentary inherits that error uncritically. Ignore the magnitude; the *direction* (overvalued) may still be defensible, but not by that math.
Now the actual numbers. Revenue grew from $9.72B (2021) to $16.10B (2025) — a 13.4% CAGR, not the "6%" the momentum module reports (that looks like a shorter-window artifact). But the deceleration is real and sharp: 2025 revenue growth was only 4.9% YoY, and the Q1 2026 print of $3.99B is *down* from $4.10B in Q4 2024 and $4.23B in Q3 2025 — a sequential rollover that matches the "decelerating" quarterly tag. Net income actually contracted in 2025 ($2.49B vs $2.58B in 2024), and Q1 2026 NI of $531M is below Q1 2025's $518M only marginally, with margins compressing from 16.8% (Q4 2024) toward 13.3% (Q1 2026). This is a cyclical peaking pattern, not a growth story. ROIC of 12.2% is fine but not exceptional for a business levered 1.77x debt/equity with a current ratio of 0.94 and only $459M cash against $15.88B debt.
The bear case writes itself and the market-forces module has it roughly right: at 29x PE and 8.3x book for a cyclical equipment renter with decelerating revenue, contracting margins, and a fully-loaded balance sheet, you are paying a growth multiple for a business that just printed negative earnings growth. The "platform monopoly" narrative is oversold — URI competes with Sunbelt (Ashtead), Herc, and thousands of regional players; customers face minimal switching costs; the "moat" is scale economics in fleet utilization and branch density, which is real but not Amazon-like. The consolidator flywheel requires cheap capital and available targets, both of which tighten in a downcycle. A contrarian bull would counter that infrastructure spending (IIJA), data center buildouts, and manufacturing reshoring provide multi-year demand that survives cyclical dips, and that URI's specialty segment carries structurally higher margins — this is legitimate, and explains why the stock deserves a premium to its 2016-2019 trough multiples (which were ~10-12x). But "deserves a premium" and "deserves 29x at cycle peak" are different claims.
My read: overvalued, but nowhere near the synthesis's absurd anchor. Normalizing earnings at ~$2.4-2.5B, applying a 18-20x multiple appropriate for a high-quality but cyclical, levered industrial at mid-cycle, gets you to roughly $45-50B market cap or $730-810/share — meaning ~30% downside to fair value, not 86%. On a bull-case where margin expansion resumes and 2027 EPS reaches $50+, 22x gets you back toward current levels, so the market is essentially pricing perfection. The insider data (all awards, no open-market buys) is neutral-to-negative — nobody is stepping up to buy at $1,150. I partially agree with the synthesis direction (overvalued) but strongly dissent from the magnitude and from the market-forces "wait for better entry" framing that implies this is close to actionable; it's not close. I also dissent from the "high debt risk / dangerously low interest coverage" flag — $5.19B operating cash flow easily services $15.88B debt; leverage is elevated but not distressed. The real risk is multiple compression on a cyclical peak, not solvency.
GPT Reading
The raw numbers say URI is still a very good business, but no longer an obviously improving one, and that distinction matters a lot at $1,150. Revenue rose from $9.72B in 2021 to $16.10B in 2025, a strong 13% annualized climb over that window, but the more recent pace is much tamer: 2025 revenue grew just 4.9% versus 2024. More importantly, profits have stopped following revenue higher. Net income was $2.58B in 2024 and slipped to $2.49B in 2025 despite the extra $750M of sales, while operating income fell from $4.07B to $3.97B. That is classic late-cycle behavior for a rental business: utilization and pricing still support top-line growth, but incremental margin is fading. The quarterly sequence reinforces it. Q1 2026 revenue of $3.99B was up from $3.72B a year earlier, yet net margin was only 13.3% versus 13.9%. Over the last four reported quarters, margins have mostly sat below the comparable 2024 levels.
That makes the valuation hard to defend. At roughly 29.8x earnings, 4.6x sales, and 5.6x EV/revenue, the stock is priced more like a structurally compounding asset-light platform than a capital-heavy cyclical lessor. URI absolutely deserves a premium to a generic industrial because it has scale, density, and a proven ability to convert demand into cash: operating cash flow was $5.19B in 2025, operating margin remains a hefty 24.7%, and ROIC at 12.2% is solid for this kind of asset base. But the market cap of $70.8B against $2.49B of net income is asking investors to pay up for continued growth plus resilience through the cycle at the exact moment earnings growth has flattened. The balance sheet is manageable, not broken, but it is not trivial either: $15.88B of debt against just $459M of cash and a current ratio below 1 leaves little room for the market to suddenly rediscover cyclicality.
What stands out most is the mismatch between quality and price. This is not a bad company; it is a maturing one being priced as if consolidation, specialty mix, and rental penetration can suppress the normal gravity of industrial cycles. Gross profit was basically flat year over year in 2025 at $6.14B versus $6.15B, which means the extra revenue did not translate into better unit economics. Net margin fell from 16.8% to 15.5%. Even on a quarterly basis, Q4 2025 revenue of $4.21B was above Q4 2024’s $4.10B, but net income dropped from $689M to $653M. When a company with debt leverage of 1.77x equity and a premium multiple starts delivering revenue growth without earnings growth, I stop paying a premium for the story and start underwriting normalized returns. On that basis, URI looks overvalued rather than catastrophically mispriced; the absurdly low DCF outputs in the prior models are not credible to me, but neither is a near-30x multiple for this setup.
The strongest pushback is straightforward: URI has earned the right to trade rich because it has become the dominant consolidator in an industry with real structural tailwinds. From 2021 to 2025, operating income rose from $2.28B to $3.97B and net income from $1.39B to $2.49B, so this is not some hollow roll-up. ROE of 27.8% is excellent, the rental model throws off substantial operating cash, and the company has shown through multiple years that scale can sustain mid-teen net margins. If specialty rental, infrastructure demand, and fleet outsourcing continue to offset any nonresidential softness, then 2025 could simply be a digestion year before growth reaccelerates. I take that argument seriously. I just weigh the recent deceleration more heavily because the valuation already assumes that the moat prevents a normal downshift, and the recent data do not show margin expansion, only margin defense.
What would change my mind is evidence that 2025 was a pause rather than a peak. If the next few quarters can produce high-single-digit revenue growth with net income growth reaccelerating above revenue—say quarterly revenue sustainably above $4.3B with net margins back toward 16.5%-17%—then the premium would look more earned. I would also want to see debt held in check while cash generation remains above $5B of operating cash flow, proving the business can keep compounding without leaning harder on leverage. Absent that, I think the right multiple is closer to a high-teens or low-20s P/E on roughly current earnings power, which points to a materially lower share price than today.
Grok Reading
United Rentals prints the profile of a high-quality consolidator that has already harvested most of the easy gains. Annual revenue climbed from $9.72B in 2021 to $16.10B in 2025, but the slope has flattened hard: 2025 growth was only 4.9% year-over-year, and the trailing quarterly run-rate shows the same 4–7% band with Q1 2026 revenue at $3.99B versus $3.72B a year earlier. More telling is the earnings line—net income fell from $2.58B to $2.49B in 2025, and recent earnings CAGR sits at a meager 1.4% with trailing earnings down 3.2% year-over-year. Operating margin held near 24.7% and net margin near 15.5%, which is excellent for an industrial rental fleet, yet those margins are no longer expanding; the 2025 gross profit of $6.14B was essentially flat versus $6.15B the prior year despite higher sales. At $1,150 the stock clears a 29.8x P/E, 4.6x sales, and 5.6x EV/revenue against mid-single-digit top-line growth and stagnant profits—multiples that would be aggressive even for a durable compounder, let alone a cyclical, capital-intensive lessor carrying $15.88B of debt against $459M cash and $8.97B of equity (D/E 1.77). ROIC of 12.2% is respectable but nowhere near the 20%+ the narrative requires to justify a platform-monopoly premium.
The numbers therefore contradict the “Amazon of rental” story more than they support it. Operating cash flow of $5.19B remains robust and funds the model, and the company still earns a 27.8% ROE on its equity base, confirming scale advantages in a consolidated market. But decelerating revenue, flattish-to-down net income, and a current ratio under 1.0 leave little cushion if construction or industrial capex softens. The valuation synthesis fair-value cluster near $160–$170 is probably too punitive on terminal assumptions, yet even a generous 18–20x multiple on $2.5B of earnings lands closer to $700–$800—still 30–40% below the current print. At roughly 30x trailing earnings the market is paying for sustained 8–10% EBITDA growth and continuous margin expansion that the last eight quarters simply do not show.
The strongest opposing case is that URI’s oligopoly position, specialty mix, and M&A flywheel can keep ROIC elevated and convert the rental-versus-own secular shift into durable free-cash-flow compounding that the trailing multiples understate. Bulls will correctly note that OCF already exceeds $5B, the payout ratio is a conservative 19%, and any re-acceleration in infrastructure or non-residential construction could re-rate earnings faster than a static DCF assumes; they will also argue that peer scarcity and network density create switching costs the pure industrial comps miss. I weigh that less heavily because the recent data already embed a healthy cycle and still show earnings contraction and decelerating revenue confidence—evidence that the easy consolidation upside is behind the stock, not ahead of it. High leverage amplifies the downside if utilization or used-equipment values slip, and a 0.65% dividend yield offers no ballast.
I would reverse to neutral or constructive only on clear evidence of re-accelerating organic volume (quarterly revenue growth sustained above 8–9% with rising specialty mix), net-income margins reclaiming the 17% zone on a trailing basis, or meaningful net-debt reduction that brings D/E below 1.2 while ROIC pushes through 15%. Absent those, the risk/reward at $1,150 is skewed the wrong way.
Big-3 Panel — where each AI stands
Advanced Analysis Forensic deep-dive · separate lenses
United Rentals has scaled revenue from $9.72B (2021) to $16.10B (2025), a ~66% cumulative lift, while operating margin held in a 23-28% band and net income expanded from $1.39B to $2.49B. 2025 FCF of $5.19B is a step-change from $416M in 2024 — plausibly reflecting a moderation in gross fleet capex after a heavy investment cycle — and OCF/NI of 2.11x with accruals at -9.2% of assets suggests earnings are cash-backed, not manufactured. Beneish M of -2.82 and Altman Z of 3.75 corroborate clean mechanics.
Verify before trusting this (5)
- Whether the 2025 FCF surge reflects a durable capex normalization or a one-off deferral of fleet spend
- Debt maturity ladder and covenant headroom given $1.58B ST debt vs $459M cash
- Cause of GM compression from 42.9% (2022) to 38.2% (2025) — mix, used-equipment prices, or wage/parts inflation
- Specialty vs general rental segment mix and whether specialty growth is offsetting general-rental cyclicality
- Customer/end-market concentration (data center, infra, non-res construction exposure)
The composite fair value of $167 and signal-adjusted $161 are almost certainly runaway low - a DCF of $90 on a business earning double-digit billions in EBITDA fails a basic sanity check and I discount it heavily. But even the EPV floor of $322 sits at roughly 28% of today's $1,151 price, and EPV is meant to be a conservative no-growth anchor, not a ceiling. The gap between any reasonable deserved value and the tape is wide enough that I cannot call this cheap regardless of which method I lean on.
Verify before trusting this (5)
- Whether 2025 FCF strength reflects a capex holiday vs sustainable normalization
- Rental rate trajectory and fleet utilization in latest quarter guidance
- Non-residential construction and industrial capex leading indicators
- Net debt / EBITDA trend and refinancing schedule
- Organic vs M&A contribution to growth
The tape is risk-on (+47) with VIX subdued at 15.5, and URI's 1.8 beta means this name catches more than its share of that lift. More importantly, the active narrative is a platform-monopoly / AI-infrastructure-picks-and-shovels story: URI is being lumped with CAT and MasTec as a 'HALO' beneficiary of hyperscaler capex, and the stock sits near 52-week highs with a strong-intensity narrative that the market is actively rewarding. News flow is corroborative - a $17.8B 2026 outlook framed as 'strong rental demand and large projects' feeds the bull story rather than cracking it.
Verify before trusting this (4)
- Any softening in hyperscaler / data-center capex commentary from MSFT, META, GOOG, AMZN that would deflate the HALO narrative
- Construction / non-residential capex indicators and ABI print for cyclical demand cracks
- Sell-side target revisions post the 2026 outlook - are numbers going up or just holding
- VIX break above 20 or a risk-off flip that would hit high-beta industrials first
AI reaches URI through three narrow channels rather than the core: demand (AI infrastructure construction consumes specialty rental at unusually high intensity), operating cost (telematics-driven maintenance, dispatch routing, dynamic rate-setting, credit and collections automation against a labor-heavy branch and service-tech base), and sales productivity (agentic quoting through URI's own digital ordering). None of these touch the reason customers hire URI — access to physical capacity without owning it, plus the maintenance and liability that come with it. The monetized unit is machine-days on a jobsite; no amount of cheap inference produces a boom lift. The real AI-linked risk is second-order and cyclical: URI's fortunes ride the capex cycle that AI is currently inflating, which makes the upside real and the downside symmetric.
None surfaced.
Verify before trusting this (8)
- specialty rental revenue growth
- power/climate fleet capex allocation
- service technician headcount and wages
- construction put-in-place spend
- rental penetration rate vs ownership
- megaproject backlog commentary
- fleet productivity rate component
- average rental duration
This lens hasn't been run for this ticker yet.
Prediction unavailable. valuation-synthesis has no result for URI — the prediction needs its fair-value anchors.