Crane Mats for Hire

Buying ground protection outright is a capital decision — pallets of aluminium mat sitting in a yard between jobs, a maintenance regime to run, storage to find. Hiring from us sidesteps all of that. You get the full configuration range, built from five module sizes — from the 13kg Mini module up to the 48kg Long and Extra Long modules, and our aluminium crane mats page sets out the sizing logic if you want it — without owning a single mat.

Sites rarely need the same footprint twice, which is why that range earns its keep. A 1.34m2 pad might suit a mobile crane's outrigger on firm ground; a 7m2-plus spread is a different job entirely — soft ground, a heavier class of crane, or a temporary access road that has to bear repeated passes rather than one static load. Every configuration we supply is rated to a safe working load of up to 80 tonnes and sits comfortably under cranes up to 150 tonnes, and every one of those figures has been independently checked by a Fellow of the Institution of Structural Engineers. Hire, and you're not gambling capital on which configuration to commit to — you tell us what the lift needs and we supply it.

Our hire terms run from a single day, through weekly, to long-term contract hire — which covers just about everything that happens on a real site: a one-off lift that needs matting for an afternoon, a multi-week piling programme, or a temporary crane pad that stays down for months. We don't impose a minimum contract length, so a short job never gets forced into a longer commitment.

If a hire turns into something more permanent — a recurring requirement across several sites, say — moving to outright purchase is straightforward. Mats bought outright can also be painted in your corporate colours, which we can't offer on hire stock, because it has to come back into the general fleet afterwards.

Every mat is inspected, cleaned, and quality-checked before we send it out on the next hire. Site mud, hydraulic fluid, the odd knock from a previous job — all of it gets dealt with before a mat goes back into circulation, and the inspection is what catches any mat that's taken damage serious enough to affect its rating, so it gets pulled rather than passed on.

For you, that means the configuration turning up on your site has been checked against the same standard every time — not just whenever it last happened to be looked at. It's the difference between hiring equipment and hiring a maintained system.

This is where a hire lives or dies. A mat system is only any use if it's under the crane before the crane needs it, and that's a logistics problem, not an engineering one. We deliver 24 hours a day, seven days a week, on our own fleet — vehicles under 3.5 tonnes, FORS Bronze-accredited — driven by our own staff, most of them CPCS certified. That last point matters more than it looks: we don't hand this to a subcontracted haulier, so the people bringing the mats understand what they're delivering and how it gets used on site.

The clearest illustration of what that setup does happened at Grangemouth Refinery. Ainscough Crane Hire needed a 7.06m2 mat configuration on site with next to no notice. The order came in at 2.50pm; the mats were on the ground in Grangemouth at 8.02am the next morning — eighteen hours, door to door, including an overnight drive to a refinery. In Ainscough's own words: "When we needed a quick turnaround on mats, the Brilliant Ideas team delivered. The 7.06m2 mat configurations we hired were ordered at 2.50pm and arrived on site in Grangemouth at 8.02am, all within 18 hours. The mats are handleable and easier and quicker to set-up than steel mats, which are heavy."

That combination — genuine 24/7 dispatch, a fleet we run ourselves, and mats light enough for a two-person team to lay with no heavy plant — is why over 80% of the UK's top twenty Tier 1 contractors already use ALIMATS, and why they've turned up on sites including HS2, Hinkley Point C, Heathrow, Gatwick, Google's King's Cross HQ, Euston Station, London Bridge, the Co-op Live Arena in Manchester, and Scottish wind farm developments.

The one thing worth having to hand before you order is the crane's imposed load on the ground, and some idea of what that ground is — even an informal assessment tells us whether you're looking at a compact pad or a wider spread across the outrigger footprint. We cover the maths properly in our load spread calculation guide; the short version for a hire decision is that the outrigger load, the ground's bearing capacity, and the configuration size are three numbers that all have to agree with one another — get that right before delivery and the mat never turns up in the wrong size.

Most hirers already have this from their lift plan or a geotechnical survey, and it's a five-minute conversation to turn it into a configuration between 1.34m2 and 8.07m2.

For a one-off lift or a defined contract, hiring is almost always the more sensible route — no storage, no maintenance liability, and the configuration changes with the job. Purchase starts to make sense once matting becomes a recurring cost across several sites or several years, at which point the sums shift towards ownership. It's enough of a question to deserve a proper answer — our Crane Mats: Hire vs Buy guide sets out the full comparison.