John Deere's Q3 Construction Sales Jumped 18%: What the Infrastructure Boom Means for Equipment Financing

Numbers from a quarterly earnings call don't usually tell a contractor much. But the figures John Deere's Construction & Forestry division posted for its fiscal third quarter of 2026 are worth a few minutes of attention, because they say something concrete about where demand for excavators, compact track loaders, and wheel loaders is actually heading over the next year or two — and that matters for whether you finance your next machine now or keep waiting for a more comfortable moment.

The short version: construction and forestry net sales rose 18% year-over-year to $3.6 billion in the quarter, operating profit surged 84% to $436 million, and the segment is now up 26% year-to-date to $10.1 billion through the first nine months of the fiscal year. Deere's own leadership pointed to one driver above the rest — “strong demand from large-scale infrastructure, data center and energy-related projects and continued investment in rental fleets.” That is not generic corporate language. It is a direct description of the jobs a lot of our customers are already bidding.

The Numbers Behind the Headline

Deere broke the quarter's gain into three pieces: a $244 million boost from price realization, a smaller $22 million lift from higher sales volume, partially offset by $65 million in increased expenses. That mix matters. A lot of the growth came from Deere being able to charge more for machines that are in genuine demand, not from flooding the market with discounted inventory — which is usually a sign that the underlying order book is real, not manufactured.

Deere's own forward guidance backs that up: the company expects North American earthmoving equipment sales to rise 5% to 10% for the full 2026 fiscal year, with compact construction equipment sales up around 5%. That is a company telling its own shareholders, in writing, that it expects the machines contractors actually buy — skid steers, compact track loaders, mid-size excavators — to keep selling at a steady clip, not cool off.

Why Data Centers and Infrastructure Are Driving This

Data center construction has turned into one of the single biggest consumers of site-work capacity in the country. A hyperscale data center campus needs mass excavation, underground utility trenching, access road grading, retention pond work, and concrete and foundation prep on a scale that dwarfs a typical commercial build — and it needs it on a compressed timeline, because the tenant (a cloud provider or an AI compute operator) is usually paying penalty clauses if the building isn't ready on schedule.

That demand doesn't just benefit the excavation contractor with the biggest fleet. Grading contractors, underground utility installers, demolition crews clearing the site, concrete contractors pouring slab, and even the compact equipment used for final landscaping and erosion control all get pulled into these projects at some point in the sequence. Add in the infrastructure spending tied to highway, bridge, and water-system work that's been running at elevated levels for several years now, and you get a demand picture that is broader than any single trade.

Electrical subcontractors running medium-voltage service to these sites, fencing and security contractors securing the perimeter, and even the paving crews finishing access roads and parking areas all show up somewhere on a data-center or infrastructure job's critical path. If your business touches any part of that sequence, this isn't abstract macro news — it's a forecast of your own bid calendar filling up.

The Machines Actually Moving

Deere's own disclosures named the 325G compact wheel loader, the 333 P-Tier compact track loader, and the 35 P-Tier compact excavator among the top sellers driving recent volume. None of those are oddball specialty machines — they're the exact size class a general contractor, a utility subcontractor, or a site-prep company already runs, which tells you this growth isn't concentrated in some narrow mega-project niche. It's showing up in the bread-and-butter compact equipment that does the actual day-to-day work on these job sites.

Deere also called out continued investment in rental fleets as part of the story. That's worth pausing on, because it cuts against the instinct to assume rental availability will keep rising to meet demand and keep rental rates in check. Rental houses are buying more because their own utilization is strong — which generally means rental rates hold or climb, not fall, right when a contractor would be hoping renting stays the cheap option.

What This Means for Financing Timing

There's a case to be made that strong demand data like this is exactly the moment equipment financing earns its keep over renting. If backlog, price realization, and rental investment are all climbing together, the window where a contractor can grab a rental machine cheaply and bid competitively against owner-operators who already financed their own equipment keeps getting narrower. Owning the machine — through financing that fits your business's actual cash flow, not a lump-sum purchase that drains your working capital — means you're not exposed to rising rental rates or availability gaps right when the work is there to be won.

This is where equipment financing does its real work for a growing business. A contractor who finances a compact track loader or a mid-size excavator while a demand wave like this is building locks in a known monthly cost structure and a piece of equipment they control completely, instead of competing with every other contractor on the same rental yard's waiting list. A few things worth thinking through before you commit to a machine:

• Rental rates tend to track utilization, not just inflation — if rental fleets are being bought up aggressively, that's usually a leading signal rates are firming, not softening.

• Infrastructure and data-center work tends to run in multi-year cycles, not a single-season spike, which changes the math on whether a machine will stay busy long enough to justify owning it.

• A financed machine is collateral and a tax-depreciable asset on your balance sheet, not a recurring expense line with nothing to show for it when the project ends.

• Price realization gains (machines costing more) make it more valuable to lock in financing terms now rather than wait for a model-year price increase to pass through to you later.

• Section 179 and bonus depreciation can make a financed machine purchased and placed in service this tax year meaningfully more attractive than the same machine purchased next year — confirm the specifics with your tax professional before you decide on timing.

A Nationwide Story, Not a Regional One

Data center and infrastructure spending isn't concentrated in one corner of the country — it's showing up in site-selection announcements across dozens of states, which is exactly why BFC Equipment Loans structures equipment financing and leasing for startups and existing businesses nationwide, with good or bad credit, instead of treating this as a regional play. Wherever the next hyperscale campus or highway expansion lands, a contractor with financing already lined up gets to bid the work instead of watching it go to whoever already owns the right machine.

We've written before about how this fits into the broader equipment market, including what it means that new equipment sales are surging while used equipment auction values have softened at the same time — a dynamic that changes the buy-new-vs-buy-used calculation for a lot of contractors right now. It's also worth understanding the dealer network behind these machines: Deere sells exclusively through independent dealers like RDO, James River, and Dobbs Equipment, and dealer density in your region is itself a factor worth weighing when you finance a machine you'll depend on for parts and service.

If you're weighing whether to finance a John Deere machine while this demand wave plays out, BFC's John Deere equipment financing program is built specifically around getting contractors into the right machine without draining working capital at the exact moment the work is showing up.

Ready to put this demand wave to work for your business? Visit our home page to learn more, or go straight to our equipment financing application to get started. Looking to buy or sell equipment outright? Browse our equipment marketplace. And if you want more coverage like this, subscribe to our blog.