Planned maintenance percentage
Planned maintenance percentage is the share of a contractor's total work order volume, or total labor hours, that comes from scheduled preventive maintenance rather than reactive, unplanned, or emergency service calls.
The inputs.
- Planned PM workWork orders or labor hours from scheduled preventive maintenance rather than reactive calls.
- Total workAll work orders or labor hours for the period — the share that planned work represents.
- ViewCompany, branch, or technician level. Most contractors track it monthly to smooth seasonal swings in emergency call volume.
How to read planned maintenance percentage.
How to calculate planned maintenance percentage
Planned maintenance percentage equals planned or PM work orders (or hours) divided by total work orders (or hours) for a period. It can be calculated at the company, branch, or even individual technician level, and most contractors track it monthly to smooth out seasonal swings in emergency call volume.
Why planned maintenance percentage matters for commercial contractors
A higher planned maintenance percentage means more predictable, recurring agreement revenue and a smoother dispatch schedule — planned work can be sequenced around drive time and technician skill, while emergency calls can't. It's also a direct signal of agreement health: a shrinking planned percentage against a growing reactive percentage on the same customer base often means agreement coverage is being under-sold or under-delivered.
How to raise your planned maintenance percentage
The two biggest levers are agreement coverage — how much of your customer base is under a maintenance agreement rather than billed time-and-materials — and PM scheduling discipline, meaning visits that are actually generated, staffed, and completed on schedule rather than deferred when reactive call volume spikes. Capacity planning matters too: without dedicated capacity reserved for PM work, reactive calls will always crowd it out.
How Thermal tracks planned maintenance percentage automatically
Thermal tags every work order by type and ties PM visits directly to the service agreement that generated them, so planned maintenance percentage rolls up automatically at the branch or company level without manual categorization. Because PM scheduling and agreement coverage live in the same system as dispatch, capacity planning for planned work uses the same schedule as everything else.
Questions attached to this term.
How is planned maintenance percentage different from PM compliance rate?
Planned maintenance percentage measures the mix of your total work — planned versus reactive. PM compliance rate measures whether your agreement-covered equipment is currently up to date with its PM schedule. One is about volume mix, the other about coverage status.
What's a good planned-to-reactive mix?
It varies by trade and customer base — treat any published ratio as general guidance and track your own trend rather than chasing a specific industry number.
Does one-time project or install work count as planned maintenance?
Usually not — planned maintenance percentage typically refers specifically to recurring PM visits generated by a maintenance schedule or agreement, not one-off installs or capital projects, which are tracked separately.
Can planned maintenance percentage be compared across branches?
Yes, as long as work order types are tagged consistently — which is one of the reasons contractors move off spreadsheets and disconnected systems, where categorization tends to drift branch to branch.
These numbers, on your own book.
If you want to see them calculated from real work orders and agreements rather than a spreadsheet, that's a demo.