Knowledge Base
Repairs and Maintenance (R&M)
Repairs and maintenance (R&M) is the operating expense category covering the labor, parts, supplies, and service contracts required to keep a property and its units in working condition.
What R&M includes in multifamily
R&M covers the recurring work of keeping units habitable and systems running: plumbing and electrical repairs, HVAC service, appliance parts, paint, flooring repairs, hardware, and the supplies behind all of it. It excludes capital replacements — a compressor repair is R&M; a full system replacement is CapEx. The National Apartment Association's 2024 benchmarking data put R&M at $1,098 per unit, up 28.2 percent since 2021 — one of the faster-growing categories on the multifamily ledger.
Why R&M rewards line-level review
R&M is a high-count, low-value category. A property can post thousands of individual charges in a year — parts, supplies, service calls — and no single charge justifies a meeting, while the aggregate carries real money. Category totals and budget comparisons cannot tell you whether each part was bought at the right price; that takes reading the invoices line by line. Priced that way against verified suppliers, The Benchmark finds an average of $22,546 in annual savings for a 200-unit property — money already being spent, just at the wrong prices.
Common R&M mistakes
The most common error is boundary confusion with capital expenditures: capitalizing repairs flatters NOI, and expensing replacements understates it — either way the books stop matching the property. The second is managing the category by total. An R&M line that lands on budget looks healthy even when every part on it was overpriced, because the budget was built from last year's overpriced actuals. Compare against maintenance cost per unit benchmarks to catch category-level problems, then go to the invoice level to catch pricing ones.
Related terms
Start with one property and one quarter
Send us a quarter of invoices and we will show you what it should have cost. If there is nothing there, we will tell you that too.
