The term capital assets is used to describe assets that are used in operations and that have initial lives extending beyond a single reporting period. Capital assets may be either intangible (e.g., easements, water rights, licenses, leases) or tangible (e.g., land, buildings, building improvements, vehicles, machinery, equipment and infrastructure).

As a practical application of the materiality principle, not all tangible capital-type items with useful lives extending beyond a single reporting period are required to be reported in a government’s statement of net position. Items with extremely short useful lives (e.g., less than 2 years) and/or of small monetary value are properly reported as an "expense" or "expenditure" in the period in which they are acquired.

When outlays for capital-type items are, in fact, reported on the statement of net position, they are said to be capitalized. The monetary criterion used to determine whether a given capital asset should be reported on the statement of net position is known as the capitalization threshold. A government may establish a single capitalization threshold for all of its capital assets, or it may establish different capitalization thresholds for different classes of capital assets. In selecting capitalization thresholds, governments should be able to report and depreciate substantially all capital asset value while eliminating the cost of tracking a large number of small-value items.

A government’s threshold for capitalization does not need to be calculated in the same way that the government would measure the asset, if it is ultimately capitalized, for reporting in accordance with GAAP. For example, a government’s capitalization policy may be to determine whether improvements to an office building (primarily plumbing and electrical upgrades) meet a dollar threshold ($20,000) before including the cost of new window and floor treatments, which will be part of the improvements, because it does not consider those to be “core costs” of the asset improvement. For assets constructed by a government’s own employees, the dollar threshold might distinguish between direct costs (time spent by construction workers, architects and engineers on that project) and indirect costs (allocated costs of the capital improvements department of public works).1

The capitalization threshold should not be the only factor used when determining if an item should be capitalized. A government should be cognizant of whether similar items are capitalized in order to be consistent in reporting. For example, assume a government, with a capitalization threshold of $10,000, purchases two pieces of similar equipment. Item A was purchased three years ago for $11,000, and item B was purchased in the current year for $9,000. The government also incurred its own direct costs (time spent by construction workers, architects and engineers on that project) and indirect costs (allocated costs of the capital improvements department of public works) for both items, which increased the values of the items to $13,000 for item A, and $11,000 for item B. Without the inclusion of the government’s own costs, item B would not have been capitalized, while other similar items would be capitalized because they were purchased at a higher price. In this case, the government may choose to capitalize item B for the sake of consistent treatment.

Capitalization is, of its nature, primarily a financial reporting matter. That is, a government’s principal concern in establishing specific capitalization thresholds ought to be the anticipated information needs of the users of the government’s external financial reports. While it is essential to maintain control over all potentially capitalizable items, there are more efficient means than capitalization for accomplishing this objective in the case of a government’s smaller tangible capital-type items.  Furthermore, practice has demonstrated that capital asset management systems that attempt to incorporate data on numerous smaller items are often costly and difficult to maintain and operate.

1) Note that while indirect costs pertaining only to capital projects should be capitalized, general overhead costs such as human resources services or the commissioner’s office staff of an agency not exclusively performing capital work should not be allocated to capital projects and capitalized. [Accounting for Capital Assets, A Guide for State and Local Governments, Stephen J. Gauthier, GFOA, 2008].

This best practice was previously titled Establishing Capitalization Thresholds for Capital Assets.