On this page
Reactive maintenance is not cheaper. It looks cheaper because the cost arrives as a series of emergencies rather than a line in a budget, and emergencies are never cheaper than the same work done on a schedule.
If you manage a building, this is how to put a number on it.
The five costs of running reactive
1. Emergency premium
Out-of-hours attendance, expedited parts, and whatever the first available contractor charges when you have no relationship and no alternative. Every reactive repair carries this. Scheduled work does not.
2. Shortened asset life
This is the largest number and the least visible. Equipment run without maintenance does not fail once — it degrades continuously, and it reaches end of life materially earlier than it should.
Model it: take your major assets, take their expected service life, and estimate what fraction you lose to neglect. Apply that to replacement cost. For a site with several large units, this single line usually dwarfs everything else in the comparison.
3. Consequential damage
The failure rarely stays contained. A blocked condensate drain becomes a ceiling. A leaking pipe becomes a floor. A failed panel room cooling unit becomes a control board. Count the repair you actually paid for, not the one you would have paid if someone had caught it early.
4. Downtime
Hours not trading, production stopped, a cold store losing stock, tenants complaining. For most commercial sites this is the number that persuades the finance director, and it is usually easy to estimate because you already know what an hour is worth.
5. Management time
Someone in your organisation spends hours on every unplanned failure — sourcing a contractor, approving spend, coordinating access, chasing completion. Multiply by the number of incidents a year. It is rarely small.
Building the comparison
Take your last two years of maintenance spend and sort every invoice into planned or unplanned. Most sites running reactively find the split is heavily unplanned, and that the unplanned side is far larger than anyone assumed.
Then add the four costs above that never appeared as an invoice. That total is your real reactive cost.
Against it, set the cost of a planned regime: scheduled visits, consumables, and the remedial work the reports will generate. The remedial line is real and should be included honestly — a preventive programme finds things, and finding things costs money in year one.
Why year one looks worse
This is the part that catches people out and it is worth saying plainly.
A preventive programme's first year is usually more expensive than the reactive year before it, because the initial survey surfaces a backlog nobody knew about. That is not the programme failing. That is the programme working — those items existed before, they were simply invisible.
The saving appears from year two, and it compounds.
Where preventive does not pay
Three honest exceptions:
Assets already at end of life. Servicing a failing compressor is spending money to delay a decision. Replace it and start preventive on the new one.
Very small or simple sites. A single-unit office needs an annual service, not a programme.
Where nobody will act on the reports. A programme producing recommendations that are never funded is an expensive filing exercise. If the budget to act does not exist, be honest about it and prioritise ruthlessly instead.
The Al Ain adjustment
Inland sites need a different schedule from the coastal templates most FM specifications are built on. Al Ain runs several degrees hotter — inland highs of 38 to 44°C against 35 to 41°C coastal, with 48°C recorded — and sandstorms occur intermittently through the hot months. Filter and condenser intervals here are shorter than a coastal specification assumes. Humidity, meanwhile, falls to around 21% in May, so drain pan and biological treatment needs are lower. Copying a Dubai schedule gets both ends wrong.
How we build one: preventive maintenance.
Related: facility management checklist for warehouses · does a contract save you money?