Off hire

Off hire explained: the moment the charges are supposed to stop

Off hire is the point at which a hirer notifies the owner that hired plant, equipment, or a vehicle is finished with and available for collection, bringing the charging period to an end. It is written off-hire, off hire, and occasionally offhire, and it is used as a noun, a verb, and an adjective in the same conversation without anybody blinking.

It is also, by some distance, the most argued over moment in the hire cycle. The reason is a gap: the hirer stops using the machine on one day, tells the owner on another, and the lorry arrives on a third.

How does off hire actually work?

The mechanism has three parts, and skipping any of them is what causes the trouble.

• Notification: the hirer tells the owner the asset is available for collection. Under the Construction Plant-hire Association Model Conditions for the Hiring of Plant, clause 24(a) requires this in writing for indeterminate hires and states expressly that oral notice given to the owner's driver or operator does not comply.
• Confirmation: the owner issues an off-hire number or reference. CPA clause 24(e) allows the hirer to off-hire by written notification through an electronic device or app, but only where the owner issues an off-hire confirmation in return. An unconfirmed off-hire is not an off-hire.
• Collection: the owner recovers the asset. Under clause 1(b), the hire period continues until the plant is received back at the owner's named depot or other agreed location.

Why the charges often do not stop when the hirer says stop

Because clause 1(b) ties the hire period to physical receipt at the depot, not to the off-hire request. Standard conditions then layer on notice periods. Clause 24(a) makes an indeterminate hire terminable on seven working days' written notice, and the hirer's obligations for loss and damage continue until the plant is returned or collected. Clause 24(b) goes further: if the hirer fails to make the plant available for collection before the end of those seven working days, those obligations continue for a further three working days or until it is actually made available and collected.

Clause 23(c) is the sharpest version of the same idea. Plant that is not made available for collection as agreed is deemed with immediate effect to be placed back on hire, with the hirer responsible for the owner's reasonable costs of trying to collect it.

So the practical rule for a site team is unromantic. Phoning it through does not end anything on its own. What ends the exposure is a confirmed off-hire reference plus an asset that is genuinely accessible when the transport turns up.

Off hire: a practical example

A telehandler is off-hired on a Friday afternoon with a confirmed reference. Collection is booked for Wednesday. On Tuesday the machine is moved to clear a delivery bay, someone catches the boom against a stanchion, and the damage is found on the loading ramp at the depot the following week. The hirer argues it went off hire on Friday. The owner points at clause 1(b) and clause 13(b), under which the hirer is liable for loss or damage for the duration of the hire period, and hire charges continue at idle time rates until a settlement is agreed. Both are describing the same four days differently.

What makes an off-hire dispute expensive

• The charging tail: idle time under CPA clause 25 runs at two thirds of the hire rate, and where damage is in play it keeps running until the settlement is agreed. A slow argument is a metered argument.
• Nobody was present: the machine sits in a compound for five days between the last operator leaving and the transport arriving, unattended and unrecorded.
• Damage found at the depot: found days later, hundreds of miles away, by someone who was never on the site.
• No dated condition record: without one, the entire question of when the damage occurred is unanswerable, so it resolves on commercial pressure instead.

Off hire compared with the terms it gets mixed up with

• Off hire versus termination: termination ends the contract. Off hire ends the charging period under it, and the contract can survive to settle damage and cleaning.
• Off hire versus collection: the notification, not the physical recovery. Standard conditions deliberately keep them apart.
• Off hire versus idle time: idle time is a reduced rate for plant that is not working but still on hire. Off hire is the attempt to stop the meter completely.
• Off hire versus off-hired condition in shipping: in time charter, off-hire is the period a vessel is unavailable and hire is suspended. Related idea, entirely different rulebook.

What settles it

Every off-hire dispute reduces to two questions: when was it made available, and what condition was it in at that moment. The first is a paperwork problem, fixed by insisting on a written request and a confirmed reference every time. The second is an evidence problem, and it is the one hire businesses keep losing.

A dated, structured record of the asset's condition taken at the point of off-hire, by whoever is on site, closes the gap between notification and collection that both parties otherwise argue about blind. Venta Capture, a product of VentaVid, does this by sending a guided capture link to the person already standing next to the machine: they record the required views in order, in a mobile browser, and the submission arrives as a structured, timestamped case rather than a handful of loose photos. It does not decide who is liable. It gives the people who do decide something dated to look at. The method is described in guided capture, and the fleet application in rental condition report.

Read this alongside hire agreement, which defines the hire period off hire is trying to end, and security deposit, which is where the unresolved balance usually lands.