Average Rental Duration

Average rental duration is exactly what it sounds like: across recent rentals of a given equipment type, how many days on average does a unit stay out before it comes back. A knee scooter and a hospital bed will have very different numbers, and that difference matters for planning.

A short-duration category (say, a walker that typically comes back in under two weeks) turns over fast, so a supplier can serve more total patients from fewer owned units. A long-duration category (a hospital bed that often stays out for months) ties up capital for a long stretch per rental, so the fleet needs more units to serve the same volume of new requests.

Duration also interacts directly with pricing. A price book with day, week, and month rates only prices fairly if someone has actually looked at how long that equipment type tends to rent for, otherwise a shop either underprices its longest-running categories or overprices short ones relative to what customers expect to pay.

The only reliable way to get this number is from real checkout and return dates already on file, not a guess. Once it exists per equipment type, it becomes a direct input to par levels and to how a price book's tiers should actually be set.