What is deferred maintenance?

Enterprises use deferred maintenance to manage their resources strategically and prioritize maintenance needs.

In addition to deferred maintenance, organizations often rely on other types of maintenance, such as preventive maintenance, predictive maintenance and scheduled maintenance, as part of an overall maintenance plan.

While these three core maintenance types are effective, resource constraints can still make it necessary to put off some repairs until later, which is where deferred maintenance comes in. In an effective deferred maintenance program, facility managers and maintenance teams assess their operational priorities and decide which maintenance issues should receive immediate attention and which they can delay.

While deferred maintenance can help teams keep critical assets performing, putting off repairs for too long can lead to a deferred maintenance backlog. Furthermore, it can lead to eventual system failures, shorter asset lifespans and safety hazards. According to a recent study, state and local governments in the United States faced a USD 105 billion backlog in deferred maintenance costs for needed repairs to roads and bridges last year.¹

Organizations typically practice deferred maintenance as part of a broader maintenance management approach that’s often grounded in a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS). CMMS platforms are software solutions that automate work orders, monitor asset performance and track deferred repairs in real time.

When practiced strategically, deferred maintenance complements other types of maintenance work and can help enterprises effectively manage limited resources. Here’s a look at four best practices that are key to successfully deploying deferred maintenance.

Deferred maintenance begins with strong asset prioritization, where maintenance teams assess incoming maintenance tasks and decide which ones they can prioritize and which ones they can defer. During this step, maintenance technicians look closely at various aspects of a requested repair, including its operational impact, required parts and labor and available resources.

Maintenance tasks that pose an immediate threat, such as electrical system failures, HVAC breakdowns and other potential safety hazards, are quickly prioritized. Other tasks, such as system upgrades and cosmetic enhancements, can be deferred. 

The core of a strong deferred maintenance practice is an easily trackable deferred maintenance backlog, ideally managed through a CMMS. Modern CMMS tools can help maintenance teams track the status of deferred jobs in real time and alert technicians when maintenance tasks are overdue.

Deferred maintenance tasks can also become a key metric for stakeholders trying to assess the effectiveness of their overall enterprise asset management (EAM) strategy. CMMS platforms enable strategic—rather than reactive—resource allocation, allowing maintenance managers to postpone non-critical tasks to meet budget requirements.

Deferred maintenance is often closely connected to preventive maintenance, a maintenance approach where technicians use maintenance logs to proactively repair assets before they break. When practiced correctly, preventive maintenance reduces the overall likelihood of breakdowns and downtime and extends asset lifespans.

However, when maintenance teams put off preventive maintenance tasks because of resource or budget constraints, the risk of unplanned downtime increases. Putting off routine maintenance tasks like lubrication, inspections and component replacements can impact asset functionality and lead to accelerated wear and tear for certain types of assets.

Perhaps the most telling metric when measuring the success of a deferred maintenance program is how many emergency repairs maintenance teams need to perform as a result of their maintenance practices. When practiced alongside preventive and planned maintenance, deferred maintenance backlogs don’t build up to the point where breakdowns and system failures require emergency repairs.

Deferred maintenance workflows that result in frequent emergency repairs are a sign that something is wrong at the core of the program and that it needs to be reassessed.

While often talked about in a negative context because it can lead to equipment failures and breakdowns, deferred maintenance offers organizations several distinct advantages over other types of maintenance. In the right context, deferring maintenance is a strategic business decision that supports broader organizational goals like increasing operational flexibility or managing maintenance budget constraints.

Here’s a look at some of the top benefits of deferred maintenance at an enterprise level:

• Fewer interruptions: In industries where asset uptime is critical and even a few minutes of downtime can result in higher costs, organizations rely on deferred maintenance. They rely on it to ensure that the maintenance activities don’t interrupt core business processes. In the automotive, aerospace and food processing industries, for example, shutdowns are often more expensive than repairs, leading maintenance managers to defer maintenance on certain assets to keep production lines running.

• Reduced maintenance costs: While putting off repairs for too long can cause assets to unexpectedly fail and cause expensive downtime, deferring maintenance activities on some non-critical assets also helps reduce maintenance costs. Not all assets require equal upkeep throughout their lifecycle. Sometimes, it is more effective to defer maintenance on these assets as they near end-of-life or replacement.

• Deeper insights: Relying on a CMMS to create and track a deferred maintenance backlog can help organizations uncover valuable insights into how their maintenance activities deliver value. Deferred maintenance tracking over time helps teams identify maintenance needs and respond to resource gaps. These insights help stakeholders better plan future maintenance budgets and prioritize investments and capital planning more effectively.

• More efficient upgrades: Deferred maintenance also helps teams identify opportunities to bundle upgrades, a practice where technicians defer single, bespoke upgrades that don’t impact asset performance until several can be performed at once. Bundling upgrades helps reduce overall maintenance costs and improves system health for many assets when compared to individual upgrades.

Despite its benefits, deferred maintenance still presents critical challenges to organizations that can impact core business processes if not properly managed.

Here are some of the most common:

• Higher TCO: Total cost of ownership (TCO) is a metric that reflects the full cost of owning an asset over its lifecycle, including identification, installation, maintenance, downtime and end-of-life expenses. While deferring certain maintenance activities strategically might yield short-term benefits, when repairs build up and cause unexpected breakdowns, they can significantly increase TCO.

• Breakdowns and system failures: When maintenance teams defer routine and preventive maintenance tasks to lower short-term costs, they increase the likelihood of unexpected breakdowns. Sudden asset failures caused by neglected repairs or upgrades often result in unplanned downtime which—depending on an asset’s criticality—can have significant financial and reputational consequences.

• Safety risks: Safety risks are a persistent problem with deferred maintenance activities. Putting off necessary repairs for too long makes systems and equipment unreliable, creating hazardous conditions for workers. Electrical system issues, structural problems with facilities and malfunctioning equipment are some common examples of safety hazards deferred maintenance can cause.

• Increased inefficiencies: Every organization deals with inefficiencies in its maintenance programs, but deferred maintenance can compound them. When not tracked by using a modern CMMS, maintenance backlogs can grow to the point where teams lose track of the maintenance tasks they need to perform. Maintenance teams must then operate in a reactive mode, regularly performing emergency repairs to keep assets from malfunctioning rather than practicing more strategic proactive maintenance.

While not as popular as other types of maintenance that are more connected to new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT), deferred maintenance is still important. It remains essential to many industries that rely on large, expensive assets.

Here’s a look at five of the most popular deferred maintenance use cases by industry.

Facility managers overseeing large, commercial buildings, college campuses and public infrastructure face numerous competing maintenance needs and limited budgets.

Non-critical maintenance tasks like aesthetic improvements and minor structural fixes can often be deferred so maintenance teams can focus on repairs that resolve significant safety risks and potential system failures.

Deferring maintenance tasks in the healthcare industry must be reserved for devices that won’t compromise or threaten patient health.

Maintenance managers in healthcare facilities prioritize high-risk systems for immediate attention and defer non-critical maintenance tasks on less important assets until later, helping reduce costs and more strategically allocate limited resources.

Industrial manufacturing maintenance operators rely on deferred maintenance to keep production lines moving and critical assets operating in an industry where downtime is often more expensive than equipment degradation.

In a large industrial plant, for example, maintenance teams will often defer maintenance tasks that don’t meet one of the three following conditions:

• The asset is still operating within planned parameters.
• The failure mode of the asset is slow-developing and unaffected by the proposed repair.
• No immediate safety risk to workers or quality risk to the product exists.

The utilities sector relies on deferred maintenance strategically to reduce costs and increase efficiencies for large, complex assets like power plants, power lines, hydroelectric dams and vehicle fleets.

Utilities maintenance teams defer maintenance tasks only when they can do it safely and ensure deferred repairs won’t interrupt the flow of energy production or increase risk to workers.

In the oil and gas industry, deferred maintenance is a tightly structured, risk-managed tactic that teams use to keep pumps and wells running and pipelines flowing while controlling maintenance costs.

Oil and gas facilities are capital-intensive assets that must run continuously to support business needs. Operators and maintenance teams at these facilities often integrate deferred maintenance into their processes strategically to maximize output and reduce downtime.