You already know what a busy morning looks like. A critical asset needs attention, production is asking questions, and your team is pulling in three directions before the shift even gets going. That’s what happens when you’re running a facility without enough visibility into what’s coming next.
The good news? Most of the time, the data you need already exists; it just isn’t driving action yet. When you track the right maintenance key performance indicators (KPIs), you get an objective view of where your reliability program stands, where it’s improving, and where you need to focus your efforts. You can minimize reactive scrambles, set up new strategies, and show leadership the numbers that demonstrate the value of your work.
In this guide, we walk you through 17 maintenance KPIs to track, provide guidance on measuring each one, and offer a framework for choosing the right indicators for your facility.
Key highlights:
- Maintenance KPIs are specific, goal-tied metrics that quantify the health of your reliability strategies and give you a data-backed way to drive improvement.
- Unplanned downtime hours, asset utilization, and PM compliance rate are maintenance KPIs examples for leaders to track.
- Choosing an effective maintenance KPI starts with your business goals. Align every metric to a specific operational outcome before you start measuring.
- When maintenance and reliability leaders connect their KPI data to real-time asset health, they gain the early visibility needed to hit production targets and build trust with leadership.
What are key performance indicators (KPIs) for maintenance?
Key performance indicators (KPIs) for maintenance are the specific metrics you define to measure the success of your reliability program against stated business goals. Tracking unplanned downtime hours is a metric. Tracking unplanned downtime hours against a target of zero unplanned stops per quarter is a KPI.
In practice, maintenance and reliability leaders use KPIs to answer the hard questions before anyone asks them. If your plant director wants to know whether the new preventive maintenance program is working, your PM compliance rate and planned maintenance percentage (PMP) give you a defensible, objective answer.
17 maintenance KPIs examples for you to track
These 17 maintenance KPIs examples span four dimensions your program depends on: execution, reliability, cost, and planning. Use them as a starting point. Your final KPI set should reflect your asset risk profile, your production goals, and where your program stands today.
| Maintenance KPIs examples | Why you should track this KPI | How to track this maintenance KPI |
| 1. Unplanned downtime hours | Loss of production capacity impacts revenue. According to ITIC, 97% of large enterprises say a single hour of downtime per year costs their company over $100K. | Log every unplanned stop by asset, shift, and cause. Ideally, you should target eight hours or fewer of unplanned downtime per week across operations. |
| 2. Preventive maintenance (PM) compliance rate | Low compliance signals that tasks in your preventive maintenance checklist are getting pushed for reactive, emergency work, which compounds risk over time. | Divide PM tasks completed on time by scheduled PM, then multiply by 100. Pull this data from your CMMS to see what’s blocking your maintenance activities. |
| 3. Planned maintenance percentage (PMP) | PMP shows whether your maintenance operations are running according to schedule. When your work is planned, you have more capacity for continuous improvement. | Calculate PMP by looking at planned hours divided by total maintenance hours, multiplied by 100. Get the numbers from your CMMS and aim for above 70% in a mature reliability program. |
| 4. Open work orders > 7 days | An aging backlog is a warning sign that your maintenance team isn’t keeping up with demand. Tracking overdue orders shows the assets most likely to need attention next. | Pull aged work orders from your CMMS system. Target fewer than 10 open orders weekly. Anything above 20 is a signal you should audit for resource gaps. |
| 5. Mean time to repair (MTTR) | Your average time from failure to fix directly determines how much production you lose per incident. Shorter MTTR means less revenue at risk per failure. | Add up the repair time across all incidents, then divide by the incident count. If you’re above eight hours, investigate parts availability and skill gaps. |
| 6. Mean time between failures (MTBF) | A rising MTBF means your assets are lasting longer between equipment failures, which is direct evidence that your reliability program is working as it should. | Log failure timestamps in your CMMS. MTBF = total uptime divided by the number of failures. Compare period-over-period to confirm your strategy is improving. |
| 7. Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) | Use OEE to see how well your maintenance operations convert asset capacity into output. It combines availability, performance, and quality into one number. | Multiply availability rate × performance rate × quality rate. Pull inputs from your CMMS and production systems, then track the trend quarter over quarter. |
| 8. Mean time to failure (MTTF) | MTTF tells you how long each piece of equipment is expected to run before it fails. This KPI helps you plan for replacements before breakdowns impact production. | Apply MTTF to non-repairable assets only. Divide the total operating hours by the number of units that failed. Use the output to time capital replacement decisions. |
| 9. Reactive maintenance percentage | A high reactive maintenance rate signals that unplanned failures may be driving your schedule. Reducing this percentage helps you reclaim control of your program. | Run reactive work orders divided by total work orders × 100. Pull from your CMMS monthly and pair with PMP to complete your strategy picture. |
| 10. Asset utilization | Low utilization reveals a gap between asset capacity and actual output. This maintenance KPI helps you catch performance losses before they compound. | Calculate actual output as a percentage of maximum potential output. Pair your CMMS with production data to spot underperforming assets early. |
| 11. First pass yield (FPY) | FPY exposes quality losses in your process. When assets run to spec, yield goes up. Drops in FPY are often the first signal a machine needs attention. | Divide units passing first-pass inspection by total units started, then multiply by 100. Link your production data to your CMMS work orders. |
| 12. Replacement asset value (RAV) | Tracking maintenance spend as a percentage of RAV tells you whether you’re over- or under-investing in your asset base relative to its remaining economic value. | Take your annual maintenance spend, divide it by your total asset replacement value from your fixed asset register, and multiply by 100. |
| 13. Standard maintenance cost per unit (SMCP) | SMCP connects maintenance costs to production outputs. Rising cost per unit signals inefficiency, even if your total spend looks flat on a budget report. | Assess total maintenance cost per unit produced in the same period. Pull cost data from your CMMS and production volumes from your ERP system. |
| 14. Work order completion rate | This number shows how you turn scheduled work into finished work. Improving this KPI in maintenance helps you demonstrate to leadership that your program is gaining traction. | Compare completed work orders with total work orders opened in the same period. Track this number weekly in your CMMS and flag any consistent drop in rate. |
| 15. Schedule compliance | Schedule compliance covers all planned work types, not just PMs. A high rate confirms your planning process translates consistently into on-time execution across the facility. | Measure the percentage of work orders completed on their scheduled date. Check the data in your CMMS and review it with your planner to stay on track. |
| 16. Maintenance backlog | Your backlog in hours or weeks shows exactly how your capacity compares to demand and where you should make the case for more resources. | Sum open work order hours in your CMMS, then divide by weekly available labor hours. Express as weeks of backlog and review monthly to track capacity trends. |
| 17. First-time fix rate (FTFR) | A low FTFR means your team returns to the same asset repeatedly, wasting labor, parts, and time that could go toward proactive work elsewhere in the facility. | Divide work orders closed without a return visit in 30 days by the total closed, then multiply by 100. Track by asset type to find recurring failure patterns. |
See how to implement reliability-centered maintenance strategies in your program.
How do I choose KPIs in maintenance?
Select maintenance KPIs that connect your team’s daily work to the outcomes your facility cares about. You don’t need to track everything; just focus on the right indicators based on your asset risk and production goals.
To choose the best KPIs in maintenance operations, consider these steps:
1. Start with the business goals you want to hit
Define your top operational priorities, then work backward to identify which indicators give you the clearest view of progress. For example, according to The State of Production Health, 30% of manufacturers list unplanned production downtime as one of their organizations’ biggest challenges. If that’s true for your facility, you can focus on maintenance KPI metrics such as MTBF, unplanned downtime hours, and PM compliance rate. They’re tied to a problem your leadership team is already trying to solve.
2. Use the SMART framework
Set maintenance KPIs that are SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. “Improve reliability” is an aspiration. “Reduce MTTR from 4.2 hours to 3.0 hours by Q4” is a KPI. The SMART framework helps to establish what success looks like before you start collecting data, which is the only way to know later whether you actually achieved it.
3. Benchmark your maintenance performance indicators
Before establishing goals for your maintenance work, look for a reference point. Start by benchmarking against your own historical performance to get a baseline. Then look externally. The Society for Maintenance and Reliability Professionals (SMRP) provides industry-standard benchmarks across key maintenance performance indicators and represents the gold standard for reliability professionals.
4. Review and refine maintenance KPI metrics as you scale
Your KPI set should evolve with your program. A facility just launching preventive initiatives needs different metrics than one running mature predictive maintenance strategies.
Maintenance managers can build a quarterly review to assess which KPIs are still driving behavior, which have become vanity metrics, and which new gaps have emerged.
Get to know the top predictive maintenance technologies for your program.
Improve maintenance performance indicators with Augury
When you track the right maintenance performance indicators, you can walk into Monday morning with a plan. You know which assets need attention, whether work orders are on track, and where to focus your team’s time.
Take Hill’s Pet Nutrition facility in Tonganoxie, Kansas. Their team oversees more than 80 critical assets, including machines as tall as nine stories, that process thousands of dollars’ worth of premium product per run. A single failure could potentially write off a batch. After deploying Augury’s Machine Health Solutions, their reliability leads started every shift with a clear picture of exactly what needed attention. The results followed:
- $1.7M in absolute material loss avoided
- 109 downtime hours prevented
- 25-30% rework reduction by scheduling fixes during planned windows
- 14% more machine issues caught early, building the case for further technology expansion
That’s what real-time equipment data does for a KPI program. Machine Health Solutions integrate with your existing CMMS to connect asset health information to your current workflows, so KPI tracking reflects what’s actually happening on the floor. If you can see bearing wear, imbalance, or misalignment weeks before a failure occurs, you can stop calculating MTTR after the fact and start preventing the failures that inflate it.
When you ground maintenance KPIs in accurate, real-time data, every conversation with plant leadership becomes easier. Get an Augury demo to see how this works.
