Equipment Depreciation Calculator

This calculator applies straight-line depreciation — the simplest and most common method for tracking equipment value over time — to photography gear. It subtracts your expected salvage/resale value from the purchase price to get the depreciable amount, then divides that evenly across the useful life in years to produce a constant annual depreciation figure. Dividing by 12 gives a monthly figure, and dividing the annual amount by your shoots-per-year gives a per-shoot cost, which is the number most useful for pricing decisions: it tells you exactly how much of each session's revenue needs to go toward eventually replacing the camera or lens that made the shoot possible. The book value shown is a simplified midlife estimate — it assumes you're exactly halfway through the useful life span and calculates value as purchase price minus (annual depreciation × half the useful life), with any negative result clamped up to zero as a hard floor.

This is a rough snapshot, not a month-by-month depreciation schedule; if you want book value at any other point in the equipment's life, the underlying math is straightforward (purchase price minus annual depreciation times years elapsed) but this tool only reports the halfway mark. Replacement year is simply the useful life rounded up to the next whole year. Straight-line depreciation is a simplification: real gear often loses value faster in year one (as it goes from new to used) and slower afterward, and actual resale value depends heavily on market conditions, wear, and whether a newer model has depressed demand for the old one. Treat the salvage value input as an estimate you should revisit periodically against real resale listings, and note this tool doesn't model tax depreciation schedules (like MACRS) — for that, see a dedicated tax deductions calculator.