There is no published Canadian percentage — BDC's own guidance stops at “calculate your payback period,” not a utilisation threshold — so treat any “60% rule” you hear as a rule of thumb, not a sourced figure.
Short answer
There isn’t an official number. BDC’s own equipment-purchasing guidance stops at calculating a payback period — the time for cost savings versus renting to repay the purchase price — and does not prescribe a minimum utilisation benchmark. Run your own break-even using your actual rental rate, financing cost and maintenance cost; a widely repeated percentage from industry chatter is not a sourced Canadian figure.
BDC’s equipment-purchasing guidance frames the buy-vs-rent decision around calculating the payback period for the specific machine, but stops there — it “doesn’t prescribe minimum thresholds or utilization benchmarks for justifying equipment purchases.” No Canadian lender or regulator publishes a universal breakeven utilisation rate, because the real number depends on your rental rate, your financing rate and your maintenance cost, all of which vary by machine, region and season.
Compare rental cost per period, multiplied by the days you actually need the machine per year, against the annual cost of owning it — the financed payment plus insurance and maintenance, spread over its useful life. BDC’s equipment loan terms — up to 125% financed, up to 12 years to repay, interest-only for the first 24 months — change that math meaningfully versus a straight cash purchase, so the same machine can pencil out differently depending purely on how it’s financed.
BDC also flags a second variable that has nothing to do with hours logged: “if equipment lasts only one or two years or you constantly need to upgrade it, you may want to lease.” Utilisation rate is only one input — how fast the equipment itself becomes obsolete matters just as much as how often you’d run it.
Treating a rule-of-thumb percentage — the “60–70% utilisation justifies owning” figures that circulate in trade forums — as if it were regulator-published fact. It isn’t published anywhere in Canada that could be verified for this answer; it’s industry folklore, useful as a sanity check but not a number to bet a purchase decision on. Run your own break-even, or ask an equipment dealer or your accountant for a payback calculation specific to the make and model — and see our companion answer on whether buying used changes that calculation.
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