We consider a piecewise-deterministic Markov process (X t ) governed by a jump intensity function, a rate function that determines the behaviour between jumps, and a stochastic kernel describing the conditional distribution of jump sizes. The paper deals with the point process N b + of upcrossings of some level b by (X t ). We prove a version of Rice's formula relating the stationary density of (X t ) to level crossing intensities and show that, for a wide class of processes (X t ), as b → ∞, the scaled point process (N b, where ν + (b) denotes the intensity of upcrossings of b, converges weakly to a geometrically compound Poisson process.