How we figure it

The rate

Take the two ways of buying the same machine. Pay cash today, at the cash price after any discount you would forfeit by financing. Or finance it, and pay the scheduled payments instead.

Your real rate is the annual rate that makes those two equal. It is the rate you are effectively paying to keep the cash in your pocket, and it includes every mandatory cost you only face because you financed.

This is not the legal APR. Most farm equipment credit is exempt from federal Truth in Lending disclosure, so most quotes are not required to show one. We compute a comparable number from the deal you were actually offered, and we call it what it is.

Why a zero percent deal is not free

If a dealer will take six thousand dollars off for cash and you give that up to get the financing, the six thousand is the price of the financing. It is interest wearing a different hat. Zero percent on the sticker and zero percent on the money are different claims.

Fees

A fee you pay either way, like tax or delivery, is not the cost of financing, so it stays out of the rate and sits on the receipt as its own line. A fee you pay only because you financed goes into the rate. An optional add-on stays out unless you say otherwise. An amount nobody can explain stops us rating the deal at all, and we say so rather than guessing what it is.

The verdict, and the buffer

We compare your rate to a published equipment rate card matched on the same country, the same amount band and the nearest supported term, and we print which band we used so you can see the match. If your rate is at or under that published rate plus one hundred basis points, the deal checks out. Above it, look closer.

The hundred basis points is our policy, not a discovered truth. It is a deliberate margin so that ordinary variation between lenders does not get read as a bad deal. Buffer policy v1 (2026-08-15). We will revisit it when we have enough real quotes to say something better, and the version will change when we do.

When we will not give a verdict

When the ledger and the payments do not reconcile, because something is missing from the deal. When an amount is unexplained. When no published card matches your size and term, including every Canadian deal, because no published Canadian equipment rate card exists to compare against. In all of those you still get the arithmetic. You do not get a stamp, and the missing stamp is the message.

Comparing you to other farmers

We show what quotes like yours carry only when at least 20 of them stand behind the figure, and we always print how many. Under that, there is no honest statistic and we show the published card instead and say so.

A cohort is the same country, the same currency, the same equipment category and condition, the same term band, the same price band, the same quarter. If that is too thin we widen it in a fixed order, dropping the price band first, then the term band, then reaching back to earlier quarters. We never widen across country, currency, category or condition. Canadian dollars and American dollars are never pooled, converted or compared.

Medians and quartiles use linear interpolation between the closest ranks, which is the R-7 definition. Check us with a spreadsheet: QUARTILE.INC gives our number back, and so does PERCENTILE.INC, and so does numpy's default. Put our quotes in a column and you will get our answer back, not one near it. Peer policy v1 (2026-08-15).

Every statistic we ever showed you is frozen onto your decode: the exact median, the quartiles, the count, which cohort it was, and when it was computed. A ticket from two years ago still says what it said, and we can prove why.

Where the published rates come from

AgDirect published equipment rates, as of 2026-08-01, at agdirect.com/rates. We keep an archived copy of the page each time we read it, so a verdict from any past day can be checked against what the card said that day. AgDirect republishes monthly and we re-check monthly.

Published rates are posted rates subject to credit approval. They are not an offer to you and we never present them as one.

What would make us wrong

A number you typed that is not what the paper says. A fee on the quote that nobody mentioned to us. A schedule that skips payments seasonally, which we do not price yet and refuse to approximate. Our own arithmetic, which is why it is all written down here.