Samsara Study Puts Equipment Theft and Loss Cost at $13.2M Per Year for Mid-Size Operations

Source: Samsara ↗

Equipment theft and loss costs mid-size organizations an average of $13.2 million a year in direct and indirect operational expenses, according to Samsara’s 2026 State of Connected Operations Asset Theft & Loss Report, released July 15.

The figure comes from a survey of 1,500 financial executives, the majority from organizations with between $250 million and under $1 billion in annual revenue, spanning construction, logistics, field services, utilities and similar industries across the United States, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany and Canada. Wakefield Research conducted the survey between Feb. 5 and Feb. 17, 2026, on Samsara’s behalf; respondents were not required to be Samsara customers.

The headline number is large, but the report’s sharper finding is what drives it. Despite heavy-equipment theft drawing the most attention, 72% of those operational costs trace to assets valued under $10,000: tools, sensors, generators and specialized parts. The compounding damage runs well past replacement cost. Among organizations without real-time asset visibility, 71% experience equipment theft every quarter, and 25% of new equipment budgets go to replacing stolen or lost gear. Shutdown costs, emergency rentals, idle labor and contract penalties push the total into millions before any replacement purchase is made.

“Before deploying Samsara, a single missing piece of equipment could delay a job, idle a crew, and force emergency procurement—all without ever knowing where the asset actually was,” said John Chaccour, Director of Technology at Total Safety. “With real-time asset visibility, we expect a 100% reduction in unreturned assets, 90% reduction in days outstanding, and our teams spending time on safety and customer service instead of searching for tools. All told, this could add up to millions in recovered operational costs.”

The productivity drain shows up across the survey in consistent terms. Searching for assets is a daily or weekly occurrence for 98% of organizations polled. At more than a quarter of organizations without real-time visibility, employees spend more than 10 hours per week looking for missing equipment, the equivalent of one full-time employee doing nothing but searching for three months a year. Without tracking, the average time to locate a missing asset stretches to 25 days, and 54% of organizations cannot recover even half of their stolen high-value equipment.

Project impact is similarly widespread. Seventy-seven percent of respondents globally, and 80% in the United States, said a missing critical asset caused a significant shutdown or delay in the past 12 months.

Samsara’s tracking hardware cited in the report includes the Asset Gateway, Asset Tag and Asset Tag XS, a family of devices the company says is built for harsh operating conditions and connected through its network of millions of linked devices.