Ice Machine Hire Cost UK: What You’ll Pay and What’s Included

Commercial ice machine hire in the UK costs £50 to £145 per month (+VAT), or £11.54 to £33.46 per week, depending on how much ice the machine makes. That covers installation, servicing and breakdown cover, and it is Barcare’s published 2026 rate across a fleet producing 25kg to 105kg of ice a day.

Ice is the one thing behind a bar that nobody notices until it runs out, and it runs out on the busiest night of the year. This is what it costs to stop that happening, and the point at which hiring stops making financial sense.

How much does ice machine hire cost in the UK?

Here are Barcare’s published rates, current at August 2026. Every price excludes VAT.

The weekly figure is the monthly rate spread across the year, not a separate weekly tariff. Billing is monthly.

Two things are worth noticing in that table. The jump from the IM45 to the IM65 costs £40 a month and buys 16kg more ice a day, while the jump from the IM25 to the IM45 costs £10 and buys 21kg. The IM45 is the value in the range if it fits your service.

The second is the power supply. All four are plug-in appliances on a 13-amp socket. That matters more than it sounds, because a machine that needs hard wiring or three-phase brings an electrician’s bill and a lead time with it before it makes a single cube. If you are weighing up equipment that does need it, we have written separately about three-phase power in commercial kitchens.

What the hire price includes

The monthly figure is the whole cost of having the machine, not a starting point that grows. It covers the machine itself, delivery, installation by our own engineers, and training for your staff on using it. It also carries a continual parts and labour warranty for as long as you rent.

Breakdown callouts cost nothing for the entire term. There is no excess and no cap on the number of visits. If the machine stops on a Friday night in August, you call us and an engineer attends, and the bill does not change.

Three things sit outside the price, and it is better to know them now than to find them on an invoice.

Chemicals and salt. Detergent, rinse aid and water-softener salt are consumables, so you budget for those separately.

Cleaning. Descaling and sanitising stay with the venue, and under UK food hygiene law they are not optional. Scale is also the most common reason an ice machine we attend has stopped producing properly, so this is the maintenance that actually protects your service. Our guide to ice machine hygiene rules sets out what the law requires and how often to do it.

VAT. Every figure on this page excludes it. An IM45 at £60 a month is £72 including VAT at the current rate.

One point in rental’s favour that rarely gets mentioned: because rental is an operating expense rather than a capital purchase, the payments are normally 100% tax deductible against your profits in the year you pay them. Buying a machine puts you into capital allowances instead. That difference can matter more than the headline rate, and it is worth putting to your accountant rather than taking from us.

Which size do you actually need?

The number people fixate on is production per 24 hours. The number that decides whether you run dry at half nine on a Saturday is bin capacity.

A machine makes ice steadily across the day. A bar uses it in a few violent bursts. The IM100 produces 105kg over 24 hours, but it can only hold 50kg of it at any one moment. Once the bin is empty you are drinking from the production rate, which is roughly 4kg an hour, and that is a very different experience.

So read the two figures together:

A venue with a long steady trade can size on daily output. A venue with a hard peak should size on the bin, and generally that means going one model up from where the daily figure alone would land you.

Physical footprint is the other constraint, and it is the one that catches people out after the order is placed. The IM100 is 1200mm tall and 704mm wide. The IM25 is 695mm by 398mm. Measure the gap, including the door swing and the clearance the machine needs to vent, before you choose.

Hiring against buying

Barcare sells ice machines as well as hiring them, so this comparison uses our own shop prices rather than someone else’s. Machines matched as closely as the two ranges allow:

The IM25 and IM65 rows are genuine like-for-like matches. The other two are close rather than exact: the C45 makes 43kg to the IM45’s 46kg, and the SDE100 holds only 30kg against the IM100’s 50kg bin, which is a real difference at peak service.

Read that last column honestly, because it does not flatter hiring. Measured on purchase price alone, hiring an IM100 costs more than owning one after thirteen months. If you have the capital, the site is yours long term and the machine behaves, buying wins on paper and it is not close after year two.

It gets starker if you shop on price rather than brand. A Blizzard BIM25 makes the same 25kg a day as the machine we hire for £50 a month, and it sells for £465.99. That is a nine month crossover. We would rather tell you that than have you find it yourself.

What the crossover column leaves out is everything that happens after installation. Servicing, breakdown cover, parts and labour sit inside the hire price and on top of the purchase price. So do the callouts. An owned machine that needs a compressor or a new pump absorbs that cost in one invoice, at whatever moment it chooses.

We are not going to put a number on annual servicing here, because we would rather publish nothing than publish a figure we have not confirmed. Ask us and we will quote it against your machine and your water hardness, which is what actually drives it.

The honest summary is that hiring is not the cheaper option over five years. It is the option that costs the same every month, needs no capital, and moves the risk of a mid-August compressor failure onto us. Whether that trade is worth it depends far more on your cash position and how long you hold the site than on the arithmetic above. We set out the full version of that reasoning in our guide to renting versus buying commercial catering equipment.

What the agreement commits you to

The minimum term is six months. After that the agreement rolls month to month and either side can end it with one month’s notice.

That is worth stating plainly because the assumption in the market runs much longer. Ask most sources what a commercial equipment rental commits you to and you will be told to expect twenty four or thirty six months. Six months is a quarter of that.

Nothing renews automatically for another fixed term. Once the six months are served you carry on monthly for as long as the machine is useful to you, and you stop when it is not.

For a seasonal site, a pop-up, or a tenant who is not yet sure the summer trade justifies the machine, that short term is the point. You can take an IM45 through a summer, see what it does to your service, and hand it back in the autumn having spent £360 plus VAT. The nearest machine to buy costs £1,149.99 and leaves you owning it in October.

Working out your own number

Three questions get you to the right machine, in this order.

When does your ice run out now? If it is at a specific hour on specific nights, that is a bin capacity problem and you should size up. If you never run out but the machine is elderly, match your current output and stop there.

How long is the site yours? Under about two years, hire almost always wins, because the crossover never arrives and you are not left selling a used machine. Beyond five, and with capital available, the purchase column starts to look very different.

What is the socket situation? All four hire machines are 13-amp plug-in, so this is usually a non-question. It stops being one if you are buying, where higher-output machines often are not.

If you want this run against your own venue rather than in the abstract, tell us your covers, your peak hours and your water hardness, and we will come back with a size and a monthly figure.

Common questions about ice machine hire

• Barcare published rental rates, ice machine range (retrieved 27 Aug 2026)
• Barcare product catalogue, Commercial Ice Makers: Hoshizaki IM-21CPE, Prodis C45, Prodis C60, Simag SDE100, Blizzard BIM25 (retrieved 27 Aug 2026)
• Barcare rental terms, minimum term and notice period (confirmed 26 Aug 2026)