Equipment Finance Australia

Will you fund my equipment?

Almost always, yes. If the equipment earns your business money and can be resold, we can usually place it, whether it is a coffee machine or a CNC mill.

Stacked Finance is an Australian equipment finance broker. We work with 63+ lenders to fund new, used, imported and privately bought equipment for manufacturers, restaurants, medical clinics, tradies, logistics operators and farms. If a machine makes your business run, this page is about how to finance it.

What equipment can you finance?

Most equipment that earns your business income and keeps a resale value can be financed. The question is rarely whether it can be funded. It is which lenders want it, and on what terms.

How lenders sort equipment

Australian asset financiers sort equipment into a few broad buckets, and the bucket decides how a deal is treated. Motor vehicles sit on their own: cars, utes, SUVs, vans and motorcycles. Category A is wheels and heavy plant, split by weight: light commercial up to 4.5 tonnes, heavy commercial above it, plus buses and coaches, trucks, trailers, and yellow goods like excavators and other construction and earthmoving machinery. Category B is everything else: other wheels and tracks like material handling and commercial mowing, and non-wheeled assets like plant and equipment, manufacturing, woodworking and metalworking machinery.

For an equipment page, non-wheeled is the category that matters most. Most equipment is non-wheeled, and that is exactly where lender appetite thins. A lender can price a used excavator against a deep second-hand market. A coffee roaster or a one-off press has no market like that, so the lender is more cautious. That is why a coffee roaster is harder to finance than an excavator.

Two ways to describe the same machine

Lenders think in categories, but resale value is described another way: primary, secondary and tertiary. Primary assets are bought and sold constantly, so they hold value and are easy to value. Secondary assets support the business but are harder to resell quickly. Tertiary and niche assets are specialised or custom, with a thin second-hand market. The two lenses describe the same machine: a CNC mill is a non-wheeled Category B asset, and it is also a primary asset because there is always a buyer for a good one.

The pattern is simple: the easier the equipment is to resell, the easier it is to finance. A forklift is easier to fund than a one-off custom press, and that shows up in the rate and the deposit.

From CNC mills to combi ovens

More than fifty equipment types, grouped by industry. If yours is not listed, ask: most of the time the answer is yes.

The list is not exhaustive. The few kinds of equipment that genuinely take more work are covered further down this page.

Heavy plant and production machinery

Heavy plant earns by the hour, not the odometer, and lenders read it differently because of it. We arrange finance for earthmoving and civil machinery, construction plant, mining equipment, and industrial and processing machinery across Australia, from a single excavator on a residential job to a full fleet on a mine site.

That includes the machines you see on a civil site every day, like excavators, dozers, graders, wheel loaders, rollers and skid steers. It also reaches the heavier end of the spread, from crushers and screening plants to drill rigs, haul trucks and production equipment. Whether it is one machine to win a new contract or a second loader to keep a crew moving, we structure the finance around how the asset earns, how many hours it has already worked, and how well it holds its resale value.

Plant also finances a little differently to a car or ute. Hours matter more than kilometres, attachments are often invoiced separately, and because most plant is not road-registered, lenders verify it by serial number and condition rather than registration papers. A lender will ask what the machine does, how old it is, and what it will be worth at the end of the term. That changes the paperwork, not the outcome.

Farm machinery is its own vertical. If you are financing a tractor, harvester or sprayer, start with our agricultural finance page, which is built around the way farming income lands.

Before you commit to a machine, get a sense of the numbers with our machinery finance calculator. Then book a free discovery call and we will line up the lender that fits.

What buyers get wrong about equipment finance

The buyer asks one question: can I afford the repayments? The lender is asking a different one: if this goes wrong, can we sell it and get our money back?

Resale value is the hidden variable behind the approval, the rate and the term. A lender does not like assets it cannot value or cannot sell. That is especially true for a chattel mortgage, where the lender holds security over the asset and needs to know it can get good resale value if it has to repossess and sell it. The easier the machine is to sell, the more comfortable the lender, and that shows up as more options and a sharper rate.

There is a second thing buyers get wrong, and it is about timing rather than resale. They price the machine and forget the gap between delivered and earning: installation, power, commissioning, training. A truck earns the week it lands. A machine earns once it is wired in and commissioned. That gap is a cost the machine has to cover before it starts paying for itself.

The equipment that is hard to place, and the way around it

Some equipment is genuinely harder to place. Custom and one-off machinery is hard, because there is no second-hand market to value it against. Fast-depreciating fitout gear is hard for the same reason. Specialised medical and lab equipment is easier than you would think, because it holds its value better than most people expect.

There is a way around the hard ones. Sometimes a lender will pull equity out of an asset the business already owns and put it toward a purchase that would not get funded on its own. We have done this with a Land Cruiser worth $120,000: the lender pulled equity out of it to fund an extension or a piece of custom machinery that would typically not get funded on its own. Now the lender has something to back the loan and some collateral.

This is a real option, not a guarantee. Not every lender will do it, which is why the panel matters. We find the lenders that will, and we will tell you honestly whether the deal stacks up.

What a $100,000 equipment loan could cost

The figures below are a worked example, not a quote. They use 6.99% p.a. as an illustrative rate, generated with our repayment calculator, and assume a $100,000 loan with monthly repayments and no deposit.

A 30% balloon is a $30,000 lump sum due at the end of the term. It lowers the monthly repayment but raises the total interest because the balloon keeps earning interest the whole time. These numbers are illustrative only.

Model your own amount, term and deposit on the equipment finance calculator.

Who can get equipment finance?

Most registered Australian businesses that can show they can make the repayments. Lenders look at the asset, your financials and your credit history, not any single number.

What lenders generally look for

• A registered Australian business with a clear use for the equipment
• The equipment itself: its age, condition and resale value
• Your ability to make the repayments, shown through financials or bank statements
• Your credit history, and your business's
• Time in business, which matters more for low doc and no doc loans

What you will need, by documentation type

Read the full breakdown in low doc vs full doc vs no doc asset finance.

Does it matter where you buy the equipment?

Yes, and it changes what we need from you, but all five paths are financeable: dealer, private seller, auction, imported, and refinancing equipment you already own.

From a dealer

The simplest path. The dealer supplies the invoice and usually the build or delivery details, and we fund the balance directly.

From a private seller

Private sales are financeable, but the lender wants proof of what the equipment is worth and that the seller owns it. A written agreement, a serial number and evidence of condition all help.

At auction

Auction purchases move fast and usually need payment quickly. We can arrange pre-approval before you bid so you know your ceiling, then settle once you have won.

Imported or still being built

Imported equipment usually means treading carefully, and you will likely need a deposit. It is harder again when the asset does not exist yet and is not in the country. The usual path is a conditional approval plus a deposit, working with the vendor who is selling the equipment. It really depends on the deal, and we can cater toward almost anything. We have done it before, and the laser clinic story on this page is one example.

Refinancing equipment you already own

If you own equipment outright, it can be used to raise capital or to restructure an existing loan. The lender values the asset as it sits today.

Finance for specific equipment

This page is the starting point for any equipment that does not have its own page. If you already know what you are buying, start here instead:

• Truck finance
• Used truck finance
• Concrete truck finance
• Trailer finance
• Car finance
• Agricultural finance
• Asset finance