A version of the following article appeared in the April 20, 2026, edition of The Charlotte Ledger, an e-newsletter with local business-y news and insights for Charlotte, N.C.
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Sunbelt Rentals, whose parent company was previously based in London, now says it’s based in Fort Mill; $11B in annual revenue
Sunbelt Rentals seems poised to be the newest Fortune 500 company headquartered in the Charlotte region. (Photo: Shutterstock)
by Tony Mecia
The Charlotte region appears to have quietly added another Fortune 500 company to its ranks.
Get ready to start hearing a little bit more about Sunbelt Rentals Holdings Inc., one of the country’s biggest providers of rental equipment for construction and industrial uses. Fortune’s annual listing of the county’s largest publicly traded companies is typically released in late May, and it looks to us like Sunbelt Rentals will join that list for the first time this year.
That’s because the company, which was previously known as Ashtead Group, reclassified its headquarters from London to Fort Mill in March and made its Sunbelt Rentals subsidiary the controlling company, according to securities filings. It started trading on the New York Stock Exchange on March 2.
That seems like a sensible move, because if your company is called “Sunbelt Rentals,” it should be headquartered in the actual Sun Belt and not in dreary and overcast London, right?
The company has annual revenue of nearly $11B, which is easily above the threshold to make it on last year’s Fortune 500 list. Using last year’s list, Sunbelt Rentals would have clocked in around No. 386, which would have been the smallest of the Charlotte region’s seven Fortune 500 companies and the only one based in York County.
The other Fortune 500 companies headquartered in the Charlotte region are Bank of America, Lowe’s Home Improvement, Honeywell, Nucor, Duke Energy, Truist and Sonic Automotive. There are an additional 12 companies in the Charlotte region that occupy No. 501 to No. 1000.
Sunbelt Rentals’ office is off I-77 near the S.C. 160 exit, not far from Fort Mill’s Baxter Village. It is unclear how many the company employs locally, and a spokesman did not return an email on Sunday. Sunbelt Rentals says it has more than 24,000 workers company-wide. Fort Mill was previously the company’s North American headquarters.
There is no great significance to having one more locally based company named to the Fortune 500 list, although Charlotte boosters and economic developers like to cite an abundance of big companies based here as an indication of the region’s business-friendly climate.