Free tool
Maintenance workload and hours calculator
See the ticket volume your doors will produce this year and how much of your available time coordinating them will consume.
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Repair spend per door calculator
Turn last year of vendor invoices into a per unit number you can compare, budget against and defend at renewal time.
Per door is the only repair number that travels. A total of twenty one thousand dollars means nothing until you know whether it covers four units or twenty. Once you have the per door figure, you can compare this year against last year, compare a 1960s garden building against a 1990s duplex, and see quickly when one property is quietly eating the portfolio.
This calculator also separates out what after hours work costs you. Emergency plumbing at 10pm on a Sunday carries a premium over the same job on Tuesday morning, and part of that premium is avoidable. Tickets that arrive with photos and a clear description get triaged faster, and a triaged leak sometimes waits until morning instead of becoming an emergency dispatch.
Your result
Repair spend per unit per year
$1,800
The figure to compare across your buildings and against last year.
Monthly reserve that funds it
$150
Set this aside per unit each month and repair invoices stop being events.
After hours premium paid per year
$1,305
The slice a faster first response and better triage can shrink.
Repair spend as percent of gross rent
Shown as a percentage of the gross annual rent your units bill.
These figures use your own invoice totals, so treat them as a baseline for next year rather than an industry benchmark.
What per door spend is telling you
A stable building with routine turnover tends to hold a steady per door number year to year, with jumps in the years a water heater or a furnace reaches the end of its service life. When the number climbs two years running without a single large replacement, the cause is usually a system rather than bad luck. Galvanized supply lines, an aging panel or a cast iron stack produce a stream of small tickets that individually look normal.
Run the calculator once per property rather than once per portfolio and the outlier shows up immediately. That is the building to plan a capital replacement for, not the one to keep patching a call at a time.
Cutting the after hours line
The after hours figure is the one most responsive to process. Emergencies that are genuinely emergencies, an active leak, no heat in a cold snap, a sewage backup, have to be dispatched immediately. But plenty of after hours dispatches happen because a report arrived with no detail, nobody could judge severity, and the safe answer was to send someone.
A report that arrives with photos and a location lets you make that call from your couch. A dripping supply stop under a sink can be shut off and scheduled for Tuesday. A ceiling actively dripping cannot. The difference between those two decisions repeated a dozen times a year is the number this calculator shows you.
Questions about this calculator
What is a normal repair spend per unit?
It varies widely by building age, climate and how much you do yourself, so treat published averages carefully. What matters more is your own trend across years and the spread between your properties. A building running well above the rest of your portfolio is the signal worth acting on.
Should capital replacements be included?
Keep them separate. This calculator is for repair and maintenance spend, the recurring stream of tickets. Roof, furnace and water heater replacements belong in reserve planning based on component service life, which is a different calculation with a longer horizon.
Does this include my own labor?
Not unless you add it. Many owners do their own small repairs and undercount the true cost as a result. If you want the honest picture, price your hours at what a handyman would charge and add that to the invoice total.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The landlord repair record template
One page per work order that captures the four dates and the two photos a deposit case, a code file or an insurance question will ask you for.
Take that figure back to a real work order
The number above assumes tickets keep arriving the way they do now, buried in a text thread with the photos still on somebody else's phone. A short walkthrough puts the same unit on screen with a timestamped report, the vendor dispatch and the completion date sitting together. Bring your own inputs and we will run it on your buildings instead of on a portfolio average.