Device as a Service in Australia

Device as a Service (DaaS) means renting your organisation’s laptops, desktops and mobile devices as a managed monthly subscription instead of buying them — with configuration, support, replacement and secure disposal included in the one price. MicroRentals has been renting and managing IT equipment across Australia since 1987, from our own fleet of over 2,000 laptops, in any brand you need.

What is Device as a Service?

Device as a Service bundles four things that organisations normally buy separately:

1. The hardware — laptops, desktops, monitors, tablets and phones, specified per role rather than one model for everyone.
2. Deployment — devices arrive imaged to your standard operating environment, enrolled in your device management platform, asset-tagged and ready to hand to a user.
3. Ongoing support and replacement — when a device fails, it’s replaced rather than repaired in place, so the user is working again the same day.
4. End of life — collection, data wiping, and responsible disposal or refurbishment.

You pay one predictable amount per device per month. You don’t carry the asset, you don’t carry the warranty administration, and you don’t inherit an ageing fleet you eventually have to find a budget to replace.

The model exists because the alternative has a hidden cost that never appears on the purchase order. A $2,000 laptop is rarely a $2,000 decision. Add extended warranty, the IT hours to image and deploy it, the loan device when it fails, the helpdesk time, and the cost of disposing of it securely three years later, and the real number is materially higher — it just arrives in pieces, across several budget lines, over several years.

What DaaS is not

• It isn’t a finance product. A finance lease is a credit arrangement with a financier, secured against the equipment, usually ending in a residual payment or a transfer of ownership. DaaS is a service contract with the provider who holds the equipment.
• It isn’t only for big fleets. Much of the Australian market quotes minimums of twenty devices or more. MicroRentals starts at 10 devices.
• It isn’t a lock-in to one brand. It shouldn’t be, anyway — see below.

Device as a Service vs leasing vs buying vs renting

Four ways to put a laptop in front of an employee. They are genuinely different, and one of them is better than the others depending on what you’re doing — not always ours.

	Buying	Finance lease	Short-term rental	Device as a Service
Who owns the device	You	A financier, until the residual is paid	MicroRentals	MicroRentals
Upfront cost	Full purchase price	Usually nil	Nil	Nil
Typical term	Indefinite	36–60 months	1 day – 12 months	12–36 months
Who handles support	You	You	MicroRentals	MicroRentals
Who replaces a failed device	You, under warranty	You, under warranty	MicroRentals, from stock	MicroRentals, from stock
Scale down mid-term	Sell the surplus	Rarely, and expensively	Yes	Yes, structured per agreement
Refresh cycle	Whenever you can fund it	End of term	Any time	Built into the term
Wipe and disposal at end of term	Your problem	Your problem	Included	Included
Balance sheet	Capital asset, depreciated	Right-of-use asset + liability under AASB 16	Often exempt — see below	Depends on the term — see below
Best for	Stable, long-lived deployments where the device will outlast three years	Organisations that want ownership but not the upfront cash	Projects, events, contract staff, surges	Fleets you want managed, refreshed and off your plate

Where buying genuinely wins. If a device will stay with the same person for four or five years, if you have the cash and the internal IT capacity to support it, and if you’re a small business that can claim it under the instant asset write-off, buying is usually cheaper. We rent equipment for a living and that’s still true. The economics turn when the fleet gets big enough that managing it becomes a job, when headcount moves faster than your procurement cycle, or when a three-year-old device is costing you more in downtime than a new one costs to rent.

How much does Device as a Service cost in Australia?

Almost nobody in this market publishes a number. We will.

Indicative starting rates as at August 2026. Shorter terms carry a higher monthly rate; larger fleets a lower one.

Device class	From, per device per month (36-month term, ex GST)
Entry business laptop (i5 / 16GB)	$48
Standard business laptop (i7 / 16GB)	$68
Performance laptop / workstation (i7 / 32GB)	$88
MacBook Pro	$95
Desktop + monitor	$75
Tablet / iPad	$16

What moves the price. Specification and brand. Volume — per-device rates fall as fleet size rises. Term length — longer terms cost less per month. Whether you need imaging to a custom SOE, device-management enrolment, asset tagging or on-site deployment. Support level and replacement SLA. Delivery location, for regional and remote sites.

What’s included at every price point: the device, configuration, delivery, warranty administration, replacement on failure, collection at end of term, and data wiping. There is no separate charge for any of those.

These are ranges, not a quote. Send us a device count and a rough spec and you’ll have a real number within 20 minutes during business hours.

How Device as a Service works

1. Specify. We map devices to roles rather than issuing one model to everyone. Field staff, developers, finance and reception have genuinely different requirements, and matching the device to the job is usually cheaper than standardising upward.

2. Configure. Devices are imaged to your standard operating environment, enrolled in your device management platform, asset-tagged and, where you want it, delivered directly to the end user rather than to a central IT desk.

3. Deploy. Stocked configurations are dispatched Australia-wide within 24 hours. Metropolitan delivery is usually next business day; regional and remote transit times depend on the courier, so we give you a realistic date at quote rather than a national average. Staged rollouts across multiple sites are scheduled to your calendar, not ours.

4. Manage. Ongoing support for the life of the contract. A failed device is replaced from stock, not sent away for repair — replacement dispatched within 4 hours in metropolitan areas and within one business day regionally.

5. Flex. Add devices as you hire. Return devices as you don’t, on terms structured into your agreement. The fleet tracks the organisation instead of the organisation working around the fleet.

6. Retire. At end of term we collect every device, wipe it and rebuild it with a fresh operating system install, and refurbish or recycle the hardware responsibly.

Does Device as a Service really move IT off your balance sheet?

Usually not — and most of what you’ll read about this in Australia is wrong.

Nearly every DaaS page in this market tells you the model converts capital expenditure into operating expenditure. Under Australian accounting standards, that’s a claim that fails more often than it holds.

AASB 16 is the reason. It requires lessees to recognise most leases on the balance sheet as a right-of-use asset and a corresponding lease liability. A 36-month fleet agreement is a lease. Signing one doesn’t make the hardware disappear from your balance sheet — it changes what appears there.

There are two exemptions, and this is where the detail matters:

• Short-term leases. KPMG Australia summarises the standard: “A short-term lease is a lease that, at the commencement date, has a lease term of 12 months or less.” Critically, “A lease that contains a purchase option is not a short-term lease.”
• Low-value assets. “Low value” isn’t defined in the standard itself, but as KPMG notes, “the basis for conclusions refers to underlying assets with a value in the order of US$5,000 or less,” and “the assessment of whether an underlying asset is of low value is based on the value of an asset when new.” Individual laptops commonly sit inside the policies organisations set for this — KPMG’s own worked illustration uses A$3,000 laptops.

What that means in practice. A long-term, all-in fleet contract with a purchase option at the end is a balance-sheet item, whatever the marketing says. A genuine rental — twelve months or less, no purchase option, no transfer of title, on assets that are individually low-value — has a real prospect of falling within an exemption. That’s a structural feature of how MicroRentals contracts, not a clever reading of the rules — our minimum term is 12 months, which is the outer edge of the short-term exemption rather than well past it.

Are the payments deductible? ATO ruling IT 28 addresses leasing arrangements for plant and machinery, and treats lease rentals as deductible where the leased goods are used by the lessee in producing assessable income. The ruling turns on whether the arrangement is a genuine lease or a sale in disguise — it flags an implied transfer of ownership, a nominal residual value, or a lessee guarantee of any residual shortfall as indicators that payments are really capital. A true rental with none of those features sits on the straightforward side of that line. IT 28 is a long-standing ruling; your accountant should confirm its current application to your circumstances.

And the instant asset write-off? It applies to assets you buy, so it isn’t relevant to renting — but it’s relevant to the decision, so here’s the honest position. As at August 2026, the ATO states that the $20,000 instant asset write-off is law for assets first used or installed ready for use between 1 July 2025 and 30 June 2026, for businesses with aggregated annual turnover under $10 million. The Government announced in the 2026–27 Budget on 12 May 2026 that it would make the $20,000 threshold permanent from 1 July 2026, and the ATO’s own guidance says of that measure: “This measure is not yet law.” You’ll find Australian accounting blogs stating flatly that it has been permanently legislated. As at the date on this page, the ATO does not agree with them. Check the ATO source before you rely on either.

Security and compliance

A managed fleet is easier to secure than an unmanaged one, and the reason is unglamorous: you know what you have.

Known devices. Every device is asset-tagged and tracked from delivery to collection. There is a current list of what exists, who holds it and what’s on it — which is the precondition for every control that follows.

Patched and current. Devices on a defined refresh cycle stay on supported operating systems. Fleets that are refreshed only when budget allows drift onto software that stops receiving security updates, and that drift is where most endpoint risk accumulates.

Configured before it ships. Devices arrive with your policies applied and your management platform enrolled, rather than being configured by whoever unboxes them.

Essential Eight. Several of the ACSC Essential Eight mitigation strategies are fleet-management functions in practice — patching operating systems, patching applications, and application control all depend on knowing and controlling your endpoints. A managed fleet supports those mitigations. It doesn’t confer a maturity level on your organisation, and any supplier telling you otherwise is overselling.

End of term. Every device is wiped and rebuilt with a fresh operating system install before it returns to the fleet. If your organisation requires certified data destruction to a specific standard — common in government, health and defence work — tell us at quote stage so we can scope it. What we won’t do is leave the question to you, which is what happens when hardware is bought outright and quietly stacked in a store room.

What happens to the devices at end of life

Everyone in this category says “sustainable.” Very few tie it to anything.

In Victoria, this is a legal question, not a marketing one. The Victorian Government states: “Since 2019, it has been illegal to put e-waste in household rubbish or landfill in Victoria.” Computers are explicitly within scope — e-waste is defined as “any item that has a plug, battery or power cord.” Most e-waste generated by business and industry in Victoria is classified as priority waste under the Environment Protection Regulations 2021, which carries obligations about how it’s handled and by whom.

Nationally, televisions and computers are covered by the National Television and Computer Recycling Scheme, which operates under the Recycling and Waste Reduction Act 2020 and the associated 2021 product stewardship rules. (You’ll see the scheme frequently attributed to the Product Stewardship Act 2011 — that Act was superseded.)

What that means for a rented fleet. The devices come back to us. That’s not a policy we adopted, it’s how the model works. Equipment is assessed, wiped and rebuilt, and either refurbished into the rental fleet or recycled through appropriate channels. Reuse is the first option because we own the asset and have every reason to extend its life — which is precisely the incentive a business that has already expensed a purchased laptop does not have.

Why an owned fleet is different

Almost every Device as a Service offer in Australia comes from one of two places: a manufacturer selling its own hardware, or an integrator reselling a manufacturer’s programme with a financier behind it. Both are legitimate. Both share two constraints.

They don’t hold the stock. When a device fails on a Tuesday, or a project needs thirty more machines by Friday, or a team shrinks and you want to hand devices back, a reseller raises a request with somebody else. We go to the warehouse. It’s a mundane difference and it’s the one your IT team will actually notice.

They’re tied to a brand. Manufacturer-backed DaaS means a manufacturer-shaped fleet. Real organisations aren’t shaped like that — design runs MacBooks, finance runs ThinkPads, the field team runs Surfaces. We’re brand-agnostic because we buy for a rental fleet, not for a channel agreement. Any brand, one contract, one support desk, one invoice.

And the history is relevant, not decorative. MicroRentals has been doing this since 1987 — nearly four decades, a rental fleet of over 2,000 laptops, Australia-wide from our Homebush warehouse in Sydney to Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide and Canberra. DaaS is, underneath the branding, a bet on residual value: the provider is guessing what a device will be worth in three years and pricing accordingly. We’ve been pricing that guess through every hardware cycle since the 386. A two-year-old reseller quoting off a financier’s rate card is making a very different kind of promise.

Frequently asked questions

MicroRentals · Australian IT rental and managed services since 1987
7-9 Underwood Road, Homebush NSW 2140 · 1300 790 650 · [email protected]
Monday to Friday, 8:30am – 6:00pm