Your rental payment is 100% tax deductible. If you purchase a trailer you would take depreciation over a given period of time and you would also have to pay a capital gain when you sold it based upon the depreciation. Uncle Sam wins the day by picking your pocket and taking your hard earned dollars through taxes.
If you were to look at rental versus purchasing you should take this into consideration. Let’s assume that you are in the 35% tax bracket. Let’s also assume for sake of simplicity that your monthly rental payment is $1,000.00, a nice round number for this illustration. Since you rent and your rental payment is 100% tax deductible, the payment you make saves you $350.00 in taxes (35% of $1,000.00 is $350.00). By renting, the after tax cost of that $1,000.00 rental is actually $650.00. You would not be paying the $350.00 to Uncle Sam because you were able to expense off the $1,000.00 rental payment per month. That would be a $4,200.00 reduction in your tax liability over a 12 month period.
If you owned that same trailer you would have to depreciate it between 7 and 12 years (your CPA would set your depreciation schedule based on your business structure), make monthly payments to the bank and once it is paid off and time to trade it in or sell it to purchase a new one pay 15-20%+ in capital gain taxes. So after taxes you may very well be better off renting versus buying your next trailer.
Disclaimer:
I am not a tax expert I am just making a suggested tax strategy that may work best for your operation. Please take my idea and run it past your CPA and get his official advice to you for your circumstances.