United Rentals, Inc Q1 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Note: This is a preliminary transcript and may contain inaccuracies. It will be updated with a final, fully-reviewed version soon.

United Rentals, Inc (NYSE: URI) Q1 2026 Earnings Call dated Apr. 23, 2026

Presentation

Operator

Please stand by. Your meeting is about to begin. Good morning everyone and welcome to the United Rentals Investor Conference Call. Please be advised that this call is being recorded before we begin. Please note that the Company’s press release, comments made on today’s call and responses to your questions contain forward looking statements. The Company’s business and operations are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond its control and consequently actual results may differ materially from those projected.

A summary of these uncertainties is included in the Safe harbor statement contained in the Company’s press release. For a more complete description of these and other possible risks, please refer to the Company’s Annual report on Form 10K for the year ended December 31, 2025 as well as the subsequent filings with the SEC. You can access these filings on the company’s website@www.unitedrentals.com. Please note that United Rentals has no obligation and makes no commitment to update or publicly release any revisions to forward looking statements in order to reflect new information or subsequent events, circumstances or changes in expectations.

You should also note that the Company’s press release and today’s call include references to non GAAP terms such as free cash flow, adjusted eps, EBITDA and adjusted ebitda. Please refer to the back of the Company’s recent investor presentation to see the reconciliation from each non GAAP financial measure to the most comparable GAAP financial measure. Speaking today for United Rentals is Matt Flannery, President and Chief Executive Officer and Ted Grace, Chief Financial Officer. I will now turn the call over to Mr.

Flannery. Please go ahead sir.

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

Thank you operator and good morning everyone. Thanks for joining our call. Yesterday afternoon we reported a strong start to 2026 including first quarter records across revenue, EBITDA and EPS. I was very pleased by the growth, margins and fleet productivity we reported as the team continues to execute against our North Star of putting the customer first. The momentum we’re carrying into our busy season along with our customers feedback for their business supports our expectations that this will be another record year as further evidenced by our updated guidance.

This is all attributed to our 28,000 team members who are laser focused every day on safely serving the customer and delivering against our goal to be their partner of choice. What exactly does this mean? Well, it means we have a broad and unmatched offering of both generate and specialty products. We invest in industry leading technology to make both the customer and our own operations more productive and efficient and most importantly, we have a track record of providing superior service our customers can depend on.

This didn’t happen by accident. We’ve developed sustainable competitive advantages through our differentiated value proposition and operational excellence, allowing us to deliver consistent performance and shareholder value. Now, having said all this today, I’ll give a quick recap of our first quarter results followed by what’s driving our optimism for the year and then Ted will go into more details around the numbers before we open up the call for Q and A. So let’s start with the quarter’s results.

Our Total revenue grew by 7% year over year to nearly $4 billion and within this rental revenue grew by almost 9% to $3.4 billion. Both first quarter records fleet productivity of 2.3% contributed to OER growth of 6.5%. Adjusted EBITDA came in at $1.8 billion resulting in a margin of 44.1%, a 60 basis point improvement year over year when you exclude the H and E benefit. And finally, adjusted EPS came in at $9.71, up 10% year over year and another first quarter record. Now let’s turn to customer activity.

We continue to see healthy growth across both our genera and specialty businesses. Within specialty which grew 14% year over year, we saw growth across all lines of business and opened 17 cold starts by vertical. Our construction end markets saw strong growth led by non residential construction infrastructure and on the industrial side, power and mining and minerals were notable standouts. With power continuing to post double digit growth, we saw a wide variety of new projects kick off in the quarter spanning health care infrastructure, power, industrial manufacturing and of course data centers.

And for you soccer fans out there, we expect to be a key partner for the World cup starting here in the second quarter. Now turning to the used market, we sold $680 million of OEC at a 51% recovery rate. We’re on track to sell approximately $2.8 billion of fleet this year supported by strong demand for used equipment. In conjunction with these sales we spent $874 million on rental capex. This was spread across replacement and growth capex with a focus on specialty and bringing in additional Gen rent equipment where we see strong demand.

Subsequently, we generated free cash flow of $1.1 billion. We’re set up for another strong year of cash generation which is a critical feature of the company. As a reminder, the combination of our industry leading profitability, capital efficiency and the flexibility of our business model enables us to generate meaningful free cash flow throughout the cycle, which can be redeployed in ways that allow us to create long term shareholder value. Finally, we allocated capital in the quarter consistent with our framework, which starts with a healthy balance sheet.

After supporting both organic and inorganic growth, we returned $500 million to shareholders during the quarter through a combination of share buybacks and our dividend. Our leverage of 1.9x remains well within our targeted range, leaving plenty of dry powder to support growth and return excess capital to shareholders. Now let’s turn to the rest of 2026. As evidenced by our updated guidance, the year is playing out better than we expected just a few months ago. Feedback from the field continues to be optimistic, particularly for large projects.

We’re carrying a strong momentum into our busy season and we feel confident we’re positioned to win in the marketplace. So to sum it all up, our unwavering focus on our strategy, which includes our differentiated value proposition, positions us well to compete effectively in the marketplace. Our customers know they can depend on us and our team is executing with strong capabilities. We see multi year tailwinds for large projects and believe we’re well positioned for these opportunities and we’ll continue to monitor and manage our cost structure and operate with capital discipline.

I’m confident the combination of our resilient business model, prudent capital allocation and balance sheet strength will allow us to continue to drive profitable growth, generate strong free cash flow and deliver compelling returns to our investors. And with that, I’ll hand the call over to Ted to review our financial results and then we’ll take your questions over to you. Ted.

William “Ted” Grace — Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Matt and good morning everyone. As Matt just shared, we’re off to a strong start to the year with first quarter records across total revenue, rental revenue, EBITDA and eps. More importantly, we’re pleased to be raising our full year guidance based on the momentum we’re carrying into our busy season and strong customer sentiment. Before we get into the details of the outlook, let’s dive into the first quarter numbers. As you saw in our press release, rental revenue increased $274 million year over year, or 8.7% to a first quarter record of over $3.4 billion.

Supported primarily by growth from large projects and key verticals. Within this oer increased by $163 million, or 6.5%, driven by 5.7% growth in our average fleet size and fleet productivity of 2.3%, partially offset by assumed fleet inflation of 1.5%. Also within rental revenue, ancillary and rerent grew by nearly 18%, adding a combined $111 million as ancillary growth continues to outpace OER pivoting to used, we sold $680 million of OEC in the quarter, generating $350 million of proceeds, an adjusted margin of 47.4% and a 51.5% recovery rate.

So solid user results overall. Next, let’s turn to EBITDA. Excluding the $52 million net benefit we realized with the termination of the H and E acquisition in the year ago period, EBITDA increased $140 million to a first quarter record of almost $1.76 billion. This was primarily driven by a $160 million increase in rental gross profit, partially offset by a $12 million decline in used gross profits excluding the impact of H and e. SGA increased $16 million year over year, but declined as a percent of revenue while gross profits from other lines of businesses increased $8 million.

Looking at profitability, our first quarter adjusted EBITDA margin was 44.1%, reflecting a 60 basis point improvement year over year excluding the impact of H and E. As expected, we continue to see geographically dispersed large projects driving much of our growth, while customer demand for ancillary services also remains strong. Nonetheless, as you saw this quarter, with the benefit of strong cost management, we expanded our underlying margins year over year and while we’ll always have normal quarter to quarter variability in costs, it remains our goal to achieve flat margins for the full year.

To give you a little more color on the cost controls, I’ll note that we recorded $45 million of restructuring charges in the first quarter, which were primarily related to the consolidation of overlapping facilities and headcount reductions. Additionally, we took steps across the organization to control variable costs and with a significant focus on labor and outside hauling. And while it’s still early in the year, we’re pleased with the results of these initiatives. Shifting to CAPEX Gross rental capex was $874 million, translating to around 19% of our full year spend at midpoint and in line with historical first quarter levels.

Moving to returns and free cash flow, our return on invested capital of 11.8% remained comfortably above our weighted average Cost of capital and while free cash flow for the quarter exceeded $1.05 billion, turning to our balance sheet, net leverage remained very comfortable at 1.9 times at the end of March with total liquidity of almost $3.4 billion. On the capital allocation front, we returned $500 million to shareholders in the quarter, including $125 million via dividends and $375 million through repurchases.

Now let’s shift to the guidance we shared last night, which reflects our confidence in delivering another year of strong results. Total revenue is now expected in the range of 16.9 to $17.4 billion, an increase of $100 million versus our initial guidance. While used sales are still expected at around $1.45 billion at midpoint, this implies full year growth ex used of roughly 7%. In turn, we’ve also raised our adjusted EBITDA guidance by $50 million to a range of 7.625 to $7.875 billion. On the fleet side, we’ve increased our gross CapEx guidance by $100 million to a range of 4.4 to $4.8 billion, reflecting the stronger demand we see.

This now implies net capex of 2.95 to $3.35 billion. And finally, we’re guiding to another year of strong free cash flow in the range of 2.15 to $2.45 billion. With the increase in CAPEX offset by higher cash flow from operations shifting to capital allocation, it remains our Plan to repurchase $1.5 billion of shares in 2026. Combined with our dividend, the this will return roughly $2 billion to our shareholders this year, equating to approximately $32 per share or a return of capital yield of about 4% based on our current share price.

So with that, let me turn the call over to the operator for Q and A. Operator, please open the line.

Question & Answers

Operator

Certainly. Thank you, Mr. Grace. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, if you do have any questions, please press Star one. At this time, you can always remove yourself from the queue, but by pressing Star two. Additionally, to get to as many questions as possible, we ask that you please limit yourself to one question and one follow up. We’ll go first this morning to David Rosso with Evercore isi. David, please go ahead.

David Raso

Hi, thank you for the time. I want to focus on margins and the cost saving initiatives versus maybe some fuel cost concerns. As you mentioned, the margins were up 60bps year over year. Incrementals were 53 the amount of savings in the first quarter, be it labor, you know, some of the real estate you spoke of, you know, I’m coming up with something like $10 million. So even without that, margins are up 40bps. Incrementals were 49. And the reason I go through those numbers is the rest of the year and I’m just using midpoints.

I appreciate that. But the rest of the year, you’re now implying margins down 20bps year over year. Incremental is only 42 and a half. And I just want to make sure how much. We should be looking at the first quarter as a little bit of an anomaly on savings and the margin. And why would we then if it’s not an anomaly, the margins would be down the rest of the year, year over year. Thank you.

William “Ted” Grace — Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, Matt, I’ll start there and then we can go from there. So thanks for the question, David. I’d say, as always, we caution people against anchoring to the midpoint. Goes without saying. We’re very pleased with the start to the year we’ve had and certainly the underlying improvement, excluding whatever the benefit was from restructuring. And you’re probably in a reasonable zip code, assuming around 10 million of benefit in the first quarter. There’s still a lot of game to be played. We feel very good about the trajectory we’re on.

Excellent execution in the first quarter, but we’ve got to sustain that through the, through the busy season, which is to say the second and third quarter. So if you look at the results, it was really kind of all three big areas of cost that provided leverage, labor delivery and R and M. So we feel like there’s broad based kind of contribution to the improvement. But again, we’ve got to sustain that through the busy season. And the area that is probably going to be the most important to focus on will be delivery through the busy season.

And so we feel really good about the start of the year. The team is incredibly focused, you know, after taking care of customers. Focusing on cost is job number two. So, Matt, I don’t know if you’d add anything. No,

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

I think you covered it. Don’t anchor on the midpoint. And more importantly, you know, the efforts we put in place we talked about to help mitigate some of the cost challenges that came with the repositioning and some of the other challenges. You know, the team’s doing a good job and we’ll continue to run that play

David Raso

And to follow up on that, then I’ll hop off. Can you give us any sense of how you’re Thinking about fleet Productivity after the 2.3% in the first quarter, cadence, full year, whatever you want to provide us would be great. Thank you.

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

Sure. David. Yeah. We feel like the supply demand dynamics in the market are conducive to driving positive fleet productivity. As you know, our goal is always to overcome that one and a half inflation bogey that we put out there. And I’m glad to see the team did that in Q1, and frankly, that’s our expectation in our guidance when we start every year. So on track, feel good about it. When I think about it qualitatively, we continue to get positive rate. We feel good. Rate’s still a good guy. The time utilization, which we’ve been talking about running at a high level for a few years now, and maybe even thought that would be a headwind this year, I’m pleased to say the team are continuing to achieve high levels of time utilization.

And then the biggest change, you know, when we think about Q4, which got a lot of explaining and a lot of focus, was really an anomaly. And that’s why we talked so much about some of the challenges in mix and we didn’t face those mix headwinds like we did in Q4. So we don’t expect to have those headwinds again. But once again we’ll continue to update you guys as we go along.

Operator

Thank you. We’ll go next now to Rob Wertheimer at Melius Research. Rob, please go ahead.

Rob Wertheimer

Thank you. I’m most curious about some of your customer commentary and I’m curious about whether you know what the timeline is, especially on some of those larger projects, when you go from having conversations about how they feel to pre orders or planning for specific projects. Some of that started to happen as that caused somebody to return. And then I’ll just ask my follow up with the same time dirt movement. Dirt equipment started moving upwards a quarter or two ago. There’s a lot of mixed signals in the industry, but some saw that as leading indicator.

I don’t know if you think that’s a tangible sign that we start at the bottom and working our way up and that’s some of the strengthening demand you’re seeing. Thank you.

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, Rob. So as far as the planning aspects, as you could imagine, the larger the project, the more time in advance the customers need to communicate with their suppliers and certainly equipment suppliers about what they’re going to need. So we’ll continue to do that. It’s a continuous pipeline of projects, as you can imagine, a continuous pipeline of those conversations. So we have more visibility on those large projects, and we feel good about not only our positioning, but the overall demand in a large project area.

So we feel really good about that. As far as dirt, certainly it makes logical sense about dirt being a leading indicator. We’re seeing strength across our portfolio, quite frankly. You saw a 6% gen rent number, and that couldn’t happen if it was just driven by dirt. Whether that’s a leading indicator for even more acceleration, we really. I would agree that the pipeline’s strong. I wouldn’t really extrapolate those numbers to us because we’re not seeing a separation, but maybe the dealership network is impacting that number as well, which is good.

But overall, we feel good about the demand cycle and we feel good about where we are with major projects.

Rob Wertheimer

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. We’ll go next now to Mike Finnegar with Bank of America. Mike, please go ahead.

Michael Feniger

Hey, everyone. Thanks for taking my questions. I was just hoping, Ted, if we could just talk about ancillary costs, repositioning costs. If we think about the bridge, I know this gets a lot of attention. Is that pressure intensifying in 2026 versus 2025, how we mark to market with what we’re seeing potentially on the fuel side. And clearly we’re seeing the cost savings come through, and that should build. Does that kind of offset maybe any increases that you’re seeing there? If we look at kind of a bridge on the margins for 26 versus 25?

William “Ted” Grace — Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, there’s a lot to unpack there, Mike, but thanks for the question. So, you know, ancillary growth, the relative growth oer kind of held constant with what we saw last year. And so, you know, obviously a big part of what we focus on strategically is taking care of our customers. And the team’s doing a great job there. I would say from the standpoint of thinking about the contribution margin from ancillary, probably very much in line with that 20%. We’ve talked about no appreciable change in the first quarter, and I don’t think we’d be looking for any appreciable change, you know, at this point for the year.

On the repositioning side, the team did a great job managing across those big three cost areas I talked about, and that does very much include delivery. If you look at our rental results, the rental gross margin is up 50 basis points year on year. And again, all three of those contributed. But delivery, which is the area where we see kind of the most focus on execution, improved about 10 or 15 basis points as a percent of revenue year on year. So a great job given the fact that we did see almost 9% rental revenue growth.

When you dig into the details, the biggest portion of repositioning will be and has been in specialty and you saw that in the numbers. They were still probably about 30 basis points behind the curve but that’s a huge improvement versus what we saw. If you think about the drag on margins last year within specialty it averaged about 150 or 200 basis points year on year per quarter. And now we’re talking about a number that’s probably on the order of 30 basis points. So they’re doing an incredible job managing that because there is a healthy amount of repositioning this year.

We’ve talked about kind of the demand drivers and we’ve talked about the focus on capital efficiency. Capital efficiency, fleet efficiency. And that will continue to be the case on fuel. It’s something we’re obviously monitoring and managing very closely. The majority of our exposure, as you know Mike, is a pass through. So that gets managed a couple different ways. But the delivery calculator is the most obvious one and that’s something that we update regularly to help pass through. Kind of the higher costs we could incur based on higher diesel prices and then on the internally consumed diesel we manage that through an active hedging program.

So a lot of focus there. Team’s doing a great job and we feel like we should be able to manage through any reasonable situation there. Matt, anything you’d add? No, I think you covered it well.

Michael Feniger

Great. And Matt, just from a follow up, I know we talked about rate. I mean there’s been a discussion around competitive dynamics particularly on the gen rent side and competition there. You know you mentioned the fleet productivity and rate. Being a good guy, are you seeing anything on the ground on maybe intensifying competition on genret or is this the one stop shop model that you guys have been building? Kind of separates you a little bit from maybe some of that competitive intensity. Just curious, you can kind of comment on that.

Thanks everyone.

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, I mean I’ve been doing this for 35 years and there’s always somebody that wants what you have, right. So what you need to do is differentiate yourself. And to the end of your point there, we spent a lot of time building a competitive moat around our offering and making sure that we’re targeting our customers needs but also targeting the customers that value that. And we feel really good about where we’re positioned. We think the major project pipeline plays into our opportunity to solve, give more solutions to our customers.

So we feel good about our positioning and where we are and the supply demand dynamics. As I said earlier to David’s question, we feel good about the supply demand dynamics in the industry and that should continue to drive positive fleet productivity. Thanks, Mike.

Operator

Thank you. We’ll go next now to Stephen Fisher of ubs. Steven, please go ahead.

Steven Fisher

Thanks. Good morning and congratulations on the quarter. Just a follow up on the rest of the year. You mentioned, Ted, that delivery is really going to be one of the key focus areas. Can you just talk about what are the keys to making sure that that works out favorably in the way you want it to, and then in terms of just any other additional inflation for the rest of the year, to what extent do you have an expectation that will be addressed by rate, or will that remaining 15 million or so of planned cost reductions cover that extra inflation?

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

Yes, Steve, I’ll take the first part of the delivery because I think it’s important just to understand we’re not going to eliminate the challenges of repositioning and delivery. The point is to mitigate it. So the good news is we put some new processes in place and those have worked in Q1. And I think Ted was referring to the challenge in Q2 or Q3 is to continue to do that when the system gets even busier. And we have a lot of focus there. But there still will be repositioning costs. The other cost actions we’ve taken are really to also help mitigate that because we still want to drive capital efficiency.

We still want to move fleet versus just buy more fleet when you land new deals. So that will continue to be a focus for us. So it’ll be two pronged. It’ll be the execution of moving fleet more efficiently as well as making sure any other cost opportunities there to help mitigate supporting that demander there so we can continue to run the business and support our customers in an efficient manner. And then, Ted, you could talk to other inflationary items.

William “Ted” Grace — Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, Steve. So I’d say

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

Outside

William “Ted” Grace — Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Of fuel, really the years played out as expected from an inflation standpoint, the areas that we talk the most about, obviously you’ve got the labor piece and we’ve been able to manage that really effectively. You can see that in our first quarter results. If you look at the numbers across the business, we got the better part of about 50 basis points of labor absorption. We talked in January about the importance of that. We’re off to a good start. So very pleased there that even in the face of ongoing inflation on the labor front, we’re getting that kind of pull through the other areas that continue to be inflationary.

We’ve talked about real estate, we’ve talked about insurance being two of the other big ones. Those again were built into the plan. They’re playing out as expected. So I don’t think there’s anything to point to there. In terms of the $15 million of cost reductions you mentioned, I’m guessing you’re talking about the incremental restructuring expense that we would have called out. So just want to clarify that. And if that is the case, okay, perfect. So obviously you would have seen the $45 million of charges we took in the first quarter.

For the full year we’re expecting 55 to 65. So at the midpoint you’d say it’s 60. So there’s another 15 million to go. When you look at the first 45, about 2/3 of that would have been real estate related. That’s the closure of overlapping facilities that we did in the first quarter. And the balance, the other third was headcount related. So probably those are the two big buckets that we’d be looking at across the rest of the year. Although it’s more likely to be real estate probably than headcount.

We’re in a good position, but we’ll have updates there periodically. And all that was built into our expectations. So for the year, just to. I think David had a pretty good estimate of what the first quarter benefit was. Around 10 for the full year. We’ve estimated that the full year benefit would be on the order of 45 to 50 million. So that was built into the initial expectations. We’re on track and you’ll see that kind of come in a linear fashion across the balance of the year.

Steven Fisher

That’s perfect. And then just maybe a bigger picture question about these facility closures. I’m curious about the trade offs here. I assume these are branches closing. Clearly you get lower costs, but I guess to what extent have you found ways to mitigate the lost revenues or other benefits from having less branch density? And if you have found ways to mitigate that, is that. Is there a broader applicability to your whole footprint or even the whole industry? Or is this a situation where it’s a trade off?

We just needed to lower costs?

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, there wasn’t really. The good news is there wasn’t too much of a trade off here other than maybe some shop space because we didn’t exit any markets. So no revenue attrition that we’re worried about here. 95% plus of our equipment’s delivered. So that consolidation didn’t have a revenue impact. And we really were specific and surgical in doing it in markets where through acquisitions we may have held on to some extra real estate. And as we looked at it, we just didn’t need it. We still have some headroom even after the consolidation for growth because we do expect to continue to grow.

So we’re talking about in a business of 1700 plus branches or let’s just keep it to North America, right? So a little less than that, we close a couple dozen branches. So not a big deal. But it’s a good question because that was one of our points. Let’s not hurt the business, but if we have excess that we don’t need to utilize, let’s not hold onto it. And that’s the way we looked at it.

Steven Fisher

Thanks very much.

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Steven.

Operator

We go next now to Jerry Revich of Wells Fargo Securities. Jerry, please go ahead.

Jerry Revich

Yes. Hi, Good morning everyone. Matt, Ted. Hi, Matt. Ted, I’m wondering if we just unpacked outstanding performance in dollar utilization in the quarter so that accele by about a point versus normal seasonality. And you know, first quarter tends to be a pretty tough quarter to get rate overall. Can you just unpack the cadence of demand over the course of the quarter? And it sounds like the quarter played out better than what you thought when we worked together at the end of January for last quarter’s call.

Could you just unpack what were the positive demand or pricing variances that you saw over the course of the quarter across gen, rent and specialty, if you don’t mind.

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, so we won’t get into that last part of the question numerically, but you know, even though we don’t give the components of fleet productivity, let’s be clear, we still focus on it relentlessly at the branch level. Capital efficiency to drive high time utilization and as well as you know, we have a very unique offering, let’s make sure we get paid for it. So we still focus on rate and time at the branch level. We just don’t call it out that way. But as I said earlier, this not only continues to be a strong focus for us, but the demand that’s out there is another part of this with the supply demand dynamics are good.

We’re going to make sure that we utilize that opportunity. As far as the dollar utilization, it’s really an output of that. Ted, I don’t know if there’s anything you want to cover specifically on dollar utilization.

William “Ted” Grace — Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, I guess you’re doing the imputed version of this Jerry. But obviously it comes back to a lot of things Matt talked about. But you know we were very pleased with the build a fleet on rent in the quarter. You can see the rental revenue growth was strong at 8.7% and we had strong fleet productivity. So you know, it came together obviously to support what was a nice improvement in that dollar.

Jerry Revich

Another way to express that is fleet

William “Ted” Grace — Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Productivity. Right,

Jerry Revich

Cool, thank you. And then in terms of just to circle back in the discussion on fleet productivity over the course of the year and we can look at $ute, as you said Ted, as a proxy for that. So the comps get pretty easy as we head into the back half of 26 for the industry. And so now that based on the range of industry data, supply demand having improved normal pricing on a monthly basis and an upturn does suggest there’s potential for fleet productivity to accelerate significantly over the course of the year.

I know it’s early on and things have to fall in place, but I just want to circle back to the our comments about north of 1.5% fleet productivity targets. It feels like our exit rate in the first quarter really points to a sharp acceleration as we head through the year again if normal seasonality and an upcycle plays out.

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. Embedded in our guidance and frankly our goal every year as we plan with the team is to make sure we overcome that inflation and in the simplest way we want to grow rent revenue faster than we grow fleet. Right. It’s not any more complicated than that. We’ll continue to manage that. But the other components of fleet productivity then rate. You know, there’s a lot of focus on rate. We’ve been running time at a high level. I’m very pleased to say it’s not a headwind for us but if we get to a point like we did in 22 where it’s, where it’s a negative trade off, then we’ll manage that appropriately.

We got to make sure we’re responsive to our customers needs. But we think we can do that. We’ve been doing it for years. Mix is the wild card and that’s why we don’t try to predict this. We had no expectation of having 0.5 in Q4 that was all mix related. So outside of that we feel good about the dynamics to drive positive fleet productivity. And as we get the results we’ll explain to you guys if it come out different than we expected, positive or negatively. With the mix dynamic, that’s really the part that’s very hard for us to predict.

But we do feel good as embedded in our updated guidance about the opportunity to outpace inflation.

Operator

Thank you.

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

Thanks Jerry.

Operator

We’ll go next now to Ken Newman of Keybanc Capital Markets. Ken, please go ahead.

Kenneth Newman

Hey, thanks. Morning guys.

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

Morning Ken.

Kenneth Newman

Good morning. So maybe going back to the inflation piece here. I know there’s been some broader market worries around some of these new section 232 methodolog and I’m assuming you’re already protected from any potential surcharges from suppliers just given that you locked in those prices at the end of last year. But just when I think about the fact that you are seeing a little bit stronger growth to start the year out, can you maybe just talk a little bit about your ability to maybe accelerate fleet growth if needed and if you can still be price cost positive if inflation starts to ramp further from here.

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

Sure, Ken. Well as you accurately mentioned. Right. We do lock in our prices for the year and then better than that, you know, we talk to our key suppliers but most of our vendors. But about, you know, we want the ability to flex up and we certainly have contractually the ability to flex down. Although that certain certainly doesn’t seem to be in our immediate future. But that flexibility and our vendors ability to respond to those flexes is a. Is a real important part of the relationship we have with our vendors.

So we do think if the end market plays out that way and demand continues to outpace our expectation like it did here in Q1, we certainly have the opportunity to flex up.

Kenneth Newman

And just to clarify on this last question, I mean are you again, I mean I know it’s early in terms of people trying to look through this, but are any of your suppliers coming to you or pushing for surcharges at this point or is this just still too early?

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

Well, we don’t talk about our negotiations with our partners but we are very, very disciplined about sticking to our original deal. So I would. We’re not, we’re not really. We’re not worried about that

Kenneth Newman

Makes sense. Okay. And then for the follow up here, you know it’s maybe just talk a little bit about the M and A pipeline. The free cash flow profile still seems pretty strong here. How active is the pipeline versus you know, when we last talked to you a quarter ago and curious if the macro environment today makes it harder or easier to do deals.

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, I wouldn’t say the macro. The pipeline hasn’t changed really over the last couple years. With the exception of COVID the deal pipelines remain pretty consistent. The real challenge for us isn’t how many deals to look at it’s expectations and how many get of us of what do we expect to do a deal and the returns we expect on a deal and to get that willing dance partner. But there’s no lack of opportunities to look at and we continue to work the pipeline. We’ve got a great MA team and business development team and as you can imagine we’d lean towards specialty specifically adding in new products.

But we’ll do tuck ins as well in the gen rent business if it fills a need and gives us capacity in a growing market. So stay tuned to your point, we have plenty of dry powder and we’ll continue to work the pipeline.

William “Ted” Grace — Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Perfect. Thanks.

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

Thanks Ken.

Operator

Thank you. We’ll go next now to Kyle Menges of Citigroup. Kyle, please go ahead.

Kyle Menges

Great. Thanks for taking the question. Maybe first off, could you talk a little bit about just if you’re seeing anything particularly in local markets, any early impacts from the geopolitical uncertainty and a fading rate cut theme impacting those markets. And I think you had embedded roughly flat local market growth in your previous guidance. Any change there?

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

No, we think the local markets continues to be stable. That’s a positive thing. Right. Whereas maybe earlier last year, the year before you were seeing some markets that were still being impacted negatively. But overall I’d say the local markets stabilized and that was our expectation. And the project pipeline on the major projects as well as our specialty growth continue to drive some of the growth drivers that we’ve been not only executing on but that we expected for this year. So we feel good about the end market.

Kyle Menges

Great, that’s helpful. And then certainly a theme that’s had a bit of a resurgence recently is just OEM dealers pushing more into rental expanding their rental fleets. Just how do you see that impacting competitive dynamics in the industry? And I’m also curious roughly what you think your product overlap is with the typical OEM dealer rental fleet. Thank you.

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, really not much overlap there. It’s something that we’re aware of and there’s a handful of them around the country that do a good job locally and regionally. But it’s not something that in our competitive dynamics or if we were doing a competitive analysis really doesn’t fall high on our radar unless maybe in a specific local markets competitive analysis. So nothing there really to talk about from our perspective.

Kyle Menges

Great, thank you.

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

Thanks Kyle.

Operator

We’ll go next now to Angel Castillo with Morgan Stanley. Angel, please go ahead.

Angel Castillo

Thanks and good morning and congrats on a strong quarter here. Just hoping to go back to the M and a question, but maybe a little bit backward looking, could you just talk a little bit about I think the roughly 700-ish million in acquisitions you’ve done over the last two quarters. Just any color on what those assets are, how much they may be contributing to sales and just any details you can share on those. I guess in particular I’m trying to understand as you think about kind of gen rent and specialty organic versus inorganic split this quarter and kind of the expectation for how much maybe it was already baked into the guide versus maybe how much might be partly driving that revenue increase.

Just trying to understand the bits and pieces there and any impact to that or your business on dollar utilization would also be helpful. Thank you.

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, sure Angel. So on the MA piece, as you saw, we spent about 400 million in the first quarter, slightly less than that. Those were 4 small deals, the majority of which the 2 of them, the 2 larger ones were done in the first week of January. So those were already embedded in our guidance. So you’re talking about a small amount of impact on the rest of the year for those other two. And then when you think about deals over the course of all of last year and this year, you know, we’re talking about like 1% of revenue growth.

So not a huge number, but still, you know, strategically things that we decided to do. So to answer the latter part of that question, not a contributor in some way, but not the reason for our, for our beat or for our updated guidance. And Ted, anything you have to add?

William “Ted” Grace — Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

The last piece on the impact on dollar yield, I think very de minimis. I mean to Matt’s point, it was a handful of small acquisitions, none of which obviously even collectively are going to move the needle in any appreciable manner.

Angel Castillo

Very helpful. And then I wanted to go back to the demand question you talked about seeing I guess in the megaprojects area continuing to see I guess strength and things coming in maybe a little bit better than you as well as strengthen some of the end markets. Could you just give us a little bit more color on kind of the various key end markets, how you’re seeing that play out? Any particular pockets where you saw a little bit more strength than you had anticipated given the seasonality and whether that was projects moving faster, weather allowing it or just perhaps URI execution win rates coming in better than you had anticipated?

Just trying to understand, I guess the underlying demand side versus maybe some more idiosyncratic again URI execution win rate type of things.

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

Well, I think the large project pipeline has been talked about pretty broadly and everybody certainly data center has been a big part of that and everybody focuses on that. But as I said in my opening remarks, it’s a lot broader than just data centers and non res construction. Overall even X data centers is still really strong. So the growth in non res is pretty broad. And then when I think about the other end markets that have added to growth, I talked a little bit in my opening remarks about infrastructure and power continues to grow at double digits.

So power has been a really strong end market that we’ve been focused on for a while now. So those are really what the drivers are. And then when you think about, you know, this is without petrochem really picking up yet that’s still a bit of a drag on a year over year basis. So we think the project pipeline then the opportunity in petrochem to pick up will continue to give us growth for the foreseeable future.

Angel Castillo

Very helpful, thank you.

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

Thanks angel.

Operator

We’ll go next now to Tammy Zakaria of JP Morgan. Tammy, please go ahead.

Tami Zakaria

Hey, good morning. Thank you so much and congrats on the great results. I’m curious about the World cup that you mentioned. Should we model a sizable maybe one time tailwind from that in the second quarter? And related to that, do you expect the event to drive demand for both specialty and gen rent or one or the other?

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

Sure, Tammy, in the scale of our company, I wouldn’t model anything extra for the World Cup. It’s already been embedded in our guidance, as you can imagine for large events like that. We knew before the year started that what we were going to need to support those folks with. But in the scale of our business, there’s not any one project or event that’s going to make a meaningful difference. That’s the great part of having such a broad portfolio. I hope that answers your question.

Tami Zakaria

It does, thank you. And a quick1. The $100 million increase gross capex is that driven by general rental or specialty

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

Across the portfolio. Now specialty is growing at a faster clip and we did 17 cold starts so it’s always going to have a little bit more of our outweighed growth capex to support those cold starts and the growth. But we’re also going to spend some money on some genrun products that are tight specifically for some major project support. So it’ll be spread across the portfolio with a little more heavyweight specialty.

Tami Zakaria

Understood. Thank you.

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

Thank you.

Operator

We’ll go next now to Tim Thine of Raymond James. Tim, please go ahead

Tim Thein

Great, thank you. Good morning. The first question, just to follow up on the. On the delivery cost recovery. I’m just curious, Matt, if you can maybe speak to how the company is positioned today versus we look back at historical periods when diesel and flatbed trucking rates really spiked. Just how the company has evolved in terms of. It’s been some years. We talked about some of the tools that you guys have had built out. So maybe just. Is there a way to kind of handicap just in terms of how you again, position today versus how maybe it would have been different in years past when we look at those periods of higher cost inflation?

William “Ted” Grace — Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, Tim, I can start there and then Matt can definitely fill in some more blanks. But obviously we’ve long focused on costs and certainly making sure that we’re managing delivery effectively. So I think if you were to look at analogous periods, 2022 would probably be the first one that comes to mind in terms of year where you saw a meaningful increase in diesel prices and you could say what happened in that episode. So on highway, diesel prices increased over 50% in 2022, year on year. If you were to look at the impact that had on our fuel line, it would have been probably like a 15 basis point increase as a percentage

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

Of revenue.

William “Ted” Grace — Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

And so you can see it’s something that was highly managed at that point. Delivery costs on the whole moved in a similar amount. And I think if you were to look at our margins in 22 xus, they increased considerably. So not that you can draw parallels between every period, but certainly I think it serves as a good example of our ability to manage through these kinds of environments pretty effectively. Matt, anything you’d add there? No, no, I think you covered it well.

Angel Castillo

Okay

Tim Thein

Then. Thanks, Ted. Just on the specialty segment, so the revenue is up, I think call it 14% year over year. If I look at the ending asset base, which I’m maybe wrongfully using as a proxy for OEC, but it was up like 16. And so I’m just. My assumption has been that specialty tends to generate higher levels of asset efficiency, which I’m sure you would. You would endorse. So I’m just kind of struggling with why that. I would have thought that relationship would have been a bit different. Is there something within that that maybe you would call out or.

I’m just trying to think through why you wouldn’t see higher level of revenue relative to the investment in that business. Hopefully that makes sense. Yeah.

William “Ted” Grace — Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Well, I’d say intuitively your assumption is correct that you do tend to get Stronger dollar yield in those assets and you can see that productivity historically. Truthfully, I’ll need to come back to you on that. I’m guessing it’s probably a function of timing but I can’t think of anything on an underlying basis that would have turned that relationship upside down. So if it’s okay Tim, I’ll come back to you on that.

Tim Thein

Thank you. Thanks Tim.

Operator

Thank you. We’ll go next now to Jamie Cook with Truist Securities. Jamie, please go ahead.

Jamie Cook

Hi, good morning and congrats on a nice quarter I guess. First question Ted, it was the first quarter in a while I think we’ve seen the gen rent margins improve year on year. So anyway, I mean should we, how should we think about the gen rent margins as we progress throughout the year? Is there any reason why, you know, the first quarter was an anomaly? And then I guess my second question, obviously the first quarter came in better than expected. I know there was that pipeline job, you know, that had a softer start, you know, in the fourth quarter.

I’m just wondering, you know, how that job is going, whether the first quarter outperformance is because that job restarted and potentially there’s a catch up and whatever we saw in the first quarter then for that reason isn’t sustainable too because it’s like you raised your guidance but you raised it by the beat or sort of less than the beat. So just trying to work through that. Thank you.

William “Ted” Grace — Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Sure. So I’ll start off and Matt, please jump in in terms of the rest of your gen rent margin. We don’t provide kind of segment margins as you know. We talked about the focus the team had starting in January on both sides of the business. But, but you asked about gen rent and they really delivered right. If you look at that gen rent gross rental gross margin being up 150 basis points, it was roughly equal contribution from labor delivery and leveraging depreciation. And within that still RNM was a positive.

So the team really did a great job and that will continue to be the focus. As I think we talked about earlier, the key will be sustaining a lot of this through the second quarter and delivery being kind of the, the one that will take probably the most focus. So if you look at that in the first quarter in gen rent that was about 50 basis points of leverage. Team did a great job. We’ve got to sustain that through the busy part of the season as we get deeper in the year. But what I would say on the whole as we’ve talked about the goal is flat margins for the full year, excluding the H and E benefit from last year.

That’s on an EBITDA basis. So it’s across the business. But certainly our goal across both segments would be to perform very well. So that was the first part. On the second part, the matting project that we talked about in January that affected the fourth quarter from a timing perspective, we’ve been delivering assets to that project. It has not entirely kicked off yet, but we’ve been mobilized. With that said, as we talked about in the fourth quarter, matting was down year on year in the fourth quarter.

It was up in the first quarter. And so that obviously was a big factor in the swing of fleet productivity that Matt talked about. That headwind we absorbed in the fourth quarter just as a function of the timing of that start that we thought would have been in 4Q ended up it’ll be 2Q. And then as it relates to, I think the follow through of the quarter, hard for us to speak to anybody’s external expectations. If you think about the $100 million revision to revenue and the 50 million to EBITDA, part of that was by the first quarter being a little stronger, you can see that we raised CapEx.

So obviously that’s going to contribute after the first quarter. But we’re off to a great start. We feel really good about where we’re heading and those are the two big components within that revision. Matt, anything I missed or covered it well.

Jamie Cook

Thank you. Jamie.

William “Ted” Grace — Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Did I miss anything in there?

Jamie Cook

No, I’m good. Thank you very much.

William “Ted” Grace — Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Okay, thanks

Jamie Cook

So

William “Ted” Grace — Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Much.

Operator

We’ll go next now to Steve Ramsey of Thompson Research Group. Steve, please go ahead.

Steven Ramsey

For sure on time utilization holding or being a positive, would you say that’s mega project driven slowly or would you say that’s local market stabilizing kind of any breakout on time utilization drivers?

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

I mean it’s everything, right? Because it’s about having the right fleet in the right places for where demand showing up. So it’s good planning, it’s good discipline about only bringing in equipment when you need it from the branch managers and the district managers out there. So I’d say it’s across the whole portfolio. We couldn’t drive this level of time utilization from just one or the other end market sector. So it’s across the board. Steve.

Steven Ramsey

Okay, that does it for me. Thanks.

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

Great. Thanks, Steve.

Operator

Thank you. We’ll go next now to Scott Schneeberger of Oppenheimer. Scott, please go ahead.

Scott Schneeberger

Thanks very much. A couple questions. One, just following up on the branches and Matt, some Of the things you were saying earlier, just to get a little more clear, was it, was it more gen rent, more specialty? I inferred specialty from the commentary, but just a little bit more clarity. And I think you said you’re going to do fewer cold starts this year than last year. And following up on Stephen Fisher’s question of your answer there, what is kind of the strategy? Can you do more with less or less or will we see in kind of out years a re acceleration of the cold starts?

Thanks.

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

Sure, Scott. So on the first part about the branch closures, it actually wasn’t more specialty. And if you think about that, it’s a lot of the it was split pretty much across the portfolio. But as you think about the acquisitions we did, you know, we just held on to some of those Ahern facilities maybe longer than we needed to as we were going through that integration. And I would think about things like that and then some of the smaller deals that maybe you guys don’t get a visibility to. So you want to work your way through it.

We don’t buy companies for cost cutting measures. We buy them to help support growth. And sometimes we hold onto that real estate and find out in the long term we don’t need it all. And so it’s a couple of dozen branches and against a huge portfolio. So not to make too much about it, but it was very surgically viewed and no risk of revenue there. We wouldn’t have closed one if there was risk of revenue. And then as far as on the cold starts, we did 17 in the quarter I think we had in January, said we were targeting around 40.

There’s a continual pipeline of that. If the team gets ahead of schedule and ahead of that pipeline, we’ll raise the number as we go. But I wouldn’t say that there’s any change in how we’re viewing the opportunities. It’s just a matter of the execution of finding the real estate, finding the people. But there’s a pipeline for each one of the specialty businesses about where there are opportunities to grow and where the other markets they’d like to get into. And we just work through that in a very methodical manner.

Scott Schneeberger

Great, thanks. Appreciate that incremental clarification. My follow up is just on the smaller projects, smaller customers. A lot of talk on this call about a lot of demand activity with the large. Curious what you’re seeing and hearing from the smaller customers on their environment. Thanks.

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, I think they feel good about the end markets in general. I would say it’s about where our expectations were that as an aggregate the local market businesses stabilize. We don’t see many markets where there’s negative growth or we need to pull fleet out of because their local market’s not going to be able to absorb it and they don’t have a lot of projects. So we feel good about that across the board. I would continue to call that stable, which is consistent with what our expectations were for the year.

Scott Schneeberger

Sounds good. Thanks.

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Scott

Operator

And gentlemen, it appears we have no further questions this morning. Mr. Flannery, I’ll turn things back to you, sir, for any closing question. Comments

Matthew J. Flannery — President and Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, operator, and thanks to everyone on the call. We appreciate your time today and I’m glad you could join us. Our Q1 investor deck has the latest updates and as always, Elizabeth’s available to answer your questions. So look forward to speaking to you all in July. And until then, please stay safe. Operator please end the call. Thanks.

Operator

Thank you Mr. Flannery thank you, Mr. Grace again, ladies and gentlemen, this brings us to the end of today’s meeting. We appreciate your time and participation. You may now disconnect.