Ask a maintenance team how much deferred maintenance it is carrying and the answer may be harder to produce than you expect.

The problem often starts with the definition.

The US federal accounting standard SFFAS 42 provides a useful definition. As the Congressional Research Service summarizes it, deferred maintenance and repairs are maintenance and repairs not performed when they should have been or were scheduled to be, and which are put off to a future period. The definition excludes work that expands an asset's capacity or upgrades it beyond its current use.

Read the middle of that definition again: when they should have been or were scheduled to be. Deferral is measured against when maintenance should have happened or when it was scheduled to happen. A formal schedule makes the gap easier to identify, but the absence of a schedule doesn't mean deferred maintenance doesn't exist.

That is why a portfolio with weak maintenance planning can have difficulty measuring its deferred maintenance backlog: there may be less documented evidence showing what should already have happened.

Three things that all get called "the backlog"

Much of the confusion comes from using one word for three different things. They have different causes, different owners and different fixes.

A long open work order queue is an operational problem, and a useful signal that a team may be understaffed, as we covered in how many maintenance technicians do you need. Backlog as a KPI is defined in our guide to facility management KPIs. Upcoming replacements belong in the capital plan, which we explained in your work-order history isn't a capital plan yet.

Deferred maintenance is the work that should already have been performed but was put off. Some of that work will remain maintenance; some items may point toward a larger repair, replacement or capital decision.

Finding it: two methods

The federal standard allows agencies to estimate deferred maintenance in one of three ways: periodic condition assessment surveys, life-cycle cost forecasting, or a similar method. For property operators, the first two translate into two practical approaches, and most portfolios need both.

Look at it. Inspect each building and estimate the cost to bring each system up to an acceptable condition. This finds what nobody scheduled, because it starts from the physical state of the building rather than from a plan. In the US, one formal framework for this kind of assessment is ASTM E2018, which provides guidance for property condition assessments and includes opinions of cost for observed physical deficiencies.

Check it against the schedule. Compare what your preventive maintenance calendar and capital plan said should have happened with what actually did. Every maintenance task that should already have been performed but has been postponed is a candidate for the deferred maintenance register. Planned replacements that have slipped past their intended timing should be tracked too, but may belong in a deferred capital renewal or capital planning category rather than deferred maintenance. This method can be built into ongoing maintenance planning, but it only finds what was scheduled or otherwise identified as due in the first place. Our annual preventive maintenance calendar is the schedule most of it will be measured against.

The first method finds the backlog you didn't know you had. The second stops a new one forming without anyone noticing.

Both depend on a word the definition leaves to you: acceptable. Deferred maintenance is the gap between current condition and an acceptable one, so the standard of acceptable has to be written down. Without it, two inspectors walking the same building can produce two different backlogs.

Measuring it: the Facility Condition Index

A backlog in currency is hard to compare across buildings. A large building will carry a larger backlog than a small one even if it's better maintained.

The Facility Condition Index is a ratio used to put a facility's backlog or renewal needs in context with its current replacement value. APPA, the association of educational facilities professionals, has described it as the cost of remedying the deficiencies in the deferred maintenance backlog divided by current replacement value, and APPA and other facilities-management sources use variations of the measure depending on what's included in the numerator. For property teams, the important point is that the ratio puts the estimated cost of identified deficiencies into context, rather than treating the dollar backlog alone as a measure of condition.

A building needing 150,000 of deferred work with a replacement value of 3,000,000 has a ratio of 5%.

Two cautions keep it honest.

It's only as good as its inputs. The numerator should come from an assessment or a documented register, not an estimate from memory. The denominator should be a current replacement value, not a purchase price or book value.

The rating scales vary. Published FCI rating bands vary by organization and application, so the ratio shouldn't be presented as a universal pass/fail scale. It's more useful to apply the same method consistently across the portfolio and track how each property's ratio changes over time. A rising ratio means the estimated deficiency or renewal cost is increasing relative to the current replacement value.

Prioritizing it

A deferred maintenance register will almost always be larger than the money available to clear it in a year. So the order matters. A practical prioritization framework can consider factors such as:

1. Safety and legal compliance. Life-safety systems, and anything with a statutory inspection or repair requirement. These aren't a budget choice. Our guide to the life-safety inspection schedule sets out what's regulated in each market.

2. Anything causing damage elsewhere. Water is the usual culprit. A failing roof flashing or a leaking riser turns deferred maintenance on one system into damage to others. Our guide to roof and building envelope inspection covers the envelope side.

3. Items where failure costs far more than repair. A component whose failure would mean an emergency replacement, a displaced resident or a closed amenity.

4. Operational or resident impact. Items whose condition materially affects day-to-day operations, access, comfort or resident experience.

5. Lower-consequence work. Items that can reasonably wait without creating significant operational, financial, safety or compliance consequences.

The right weighting depends on the building, the lease obligations and the local rules. What matters is that the order is decided deliberately and written down, rather than set by whoever complained most recently.

Working it down

Clearing a backlog is a capital decision as much as a maintenance one.

• Move the big items into the capital plan. Anything that's really a deferred replacement belongs in the plan alongside upcoming replacements, so it competes for funding on the same terms. For individual equipment decisions, our guide to HVAC repair versus replacement shows how age, repair history and timing combine.

• Fund it separately from routine maintenance. A backlog cleared by cutting this year's preventive program is often just rebuilt next year.

• Be clear about what counts. The federal definition excludes upgrades that expand capacity or change an asset's use. Mixing improvements into a deferred maintenance total makes the backlog look larger and the plan harder to defend. Whether a given project should be capitalized is a separate accounting question, covered in our guide to separating CapEx from OpEx.

• Stop the inflow. A backlog that's being cleared while new deferrals are added at the same rate isn't shrinking. Track both.

Reporting it

Deferred maintenance is easy to overlook in financial reporting, because it usually doesn't appear there. Even in US federal financial statements, which disclose deferred maintenance in detail, the Treasury's reporting has noted that the estimates are not recognized as a liability on the balance sheet.

For a private operator, that means a building can show healthy operating numbers while carrying a growing obligation nobody has written down. Owners should see the register, the ratio trend and what was cleared and added in the period, alongside the usual financials. We covered what's typically missing from owner reporting in what your owner report doesn't say about leasing, and the same logic applies here.

In community associations the consequences land on owners directly, because an underfunded backlog is a common route to a special levy. The relationship between the maintenance plan and the association's long-term fund is covered in an HOA preventive maintenance plan is not a schedule.

When you take over a portfolio

Taking on new properties is when deferred maintenance matters most and is least visible. The previous owner's records may be thin, the schedule may not exist, and the second method, checking against the schedule, has nothing to check against.

Research on smaller properties shows why this matters. The Terner Center for Housing Innovation's survey of owners and managers of 5- to 49-unit properties found that owners of 25% of properties reported postponing some maintenance, and that serious cash flow problems were associated with deferred maintenance.

So on takeover, start with the first method: an inspection-based baseline, formal or internal, that sets an opening register and an opening ratio for each building. From then on, the schedule-based method keeps it current.

A backlog nobody measures is a backlog nobody owns. It grows quietly, doesn't appear in the accounts, and arrives in a single bad year as failures that were each individually postponed for sensible reasons.

Measuring it doesn't require anything exotic. It requires a schedule and a written standard for acceptable condition to measure against, and records that connect each overdue item to a specific asset and a cost.

RIOO's Utility & Assets Management provides a centralized asset registry with equipment records, warranties and service history. Maintenance planning and scheduling holds the preventive schedule that deferral is measured against, Service Request & Task Management tracks work orders and maintenance history by asset, and dashboards and reports show what's overdue across properties.

Pick one building and ask two questions: which scheduled tasks and planned replacements are past due, and when did someone last inspect it against a written standard? If the first answer is "none" and the second is "never," the building doesn't have no deferred maintenance. It has an unmeasured backlog.

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What is deferred maintenance?
Maintenance and repairs that were not performed when they should have been or were scheduled to be, and were put off to a future period. The US federal accounting standard, SFFAS 42, uses this definition and excludes upgrades that expand an asset's capacity or change its use.

Q2. How do you measure deferred maintenance?
Two ways, ideally combined. Inspect each building and estimate the cost to bring each system to an acceptable condition, and compare what your maintenance schedule said should have happened with what actually did. The first finds needs nobody scheduled; the second keeps the register current.

Q3. What is the Facility Condition Index?
A ratio that puts the estimated cost of a facility's identified deficiencies or renewal needs in context with its current replacement value. Organizations use variations of the measure, and published rating bands differ, so it's most useful for comparing buildings within one portfolio and tracking each over time.

Q4. Is deferred maintenance the same as a work order backlog?
No. A work order backlog is requests received and not yet completed, usually measured in days or weeks. Deferred maintenance is work that should already have been performed and was postponed, often for months or years, and frequently includes items no one has raised a work order for.

Q5. How should deferred maintenance be prioritized?
Consider safety and compliance, damage to other systems, the cost of failure compared with repair, operational and resident impact, and whether the work can reasonably wait. The right weighting depends on the property, its obligations and local rules.