The verified benchmarks: $1,098 per unit in R&M for 2024
The strongest public figure comes from the National Apartment Association's 2024 Income/Expense IQ benchmarking data, published with IREM and BOMA and drawn from more than one million units across 4,600-plus properties in 109 metro markets. Repairs and maintenance came in at $1,098 per unit, up 3.7% year over year and 28.2% since 2021. Total operating expenses reached $8,657 per unit, up 2.2% from 2023 — see multifamily operating expenses per unit for the full stack. One more useful check: industry references such as HelloData put a healthy operating expense ratio between 35% and 50% of effective gross income. Anchor to these figures. Most other numbers circulating online are uncited, recycled, or both.
What R&M includes — and what it does not
R&M covers the recurring, expensed cost of keeping a property functioning: work orders, parts and maintenance supplies, plumbing and electrical repairs, HVAC service, appliance repair, grounds, and contract services. It excludes capital expenditures — roof replacement, full system change-outs, renovation programs — which are capitalized rather than expensed. It also differs from turn cost. Zego's survey of 630 property managers, covered by Multifamily Dive, put the average cost of turning a unit at $3,872 — but that figure bundles advertising, concessions, and lost rent alongside repairs. Only the repair portion of a turn typically lands in R&M. Before comparing your number to the $1,098 benchmark, confirm your ledger draws the same lines. A property that capitalizes appliance replacements will look leaner than one that expenses them, with no operational difference at all.
Why identical cost per unit can hide very different waste
Published benchmarks are survey aggregates rolled up by general-ledger category. A GL total records what a property spent, not what the work should have cost. Two properties can post an identical cost per unit while running very different operations: one completes more work orders at fair prices, the other completes fewer at inflated ones. The average cannot distinguish them. That is the structural limit of expense benchmarking at the category level. Multifamily R&M is thousands of small transactions a year, none individually worth reviewing, while the aggregate carries real money. Overpayment lives at the line level — a part bought from the wrong supplier, a service billed above market — and a category-level comparison can never surface it. Matching the national average proves nothing about whether you bought well.
How age, class, and region move the number
Expect systematic drift from the average. Older assets carry more R&M: aging plumbing, electrical, and mechanical systems fail more often and cost more to keep running. Class matters through finish levels and system complexity, but it also cuts the other way — newer Class A equipment is often still under warranty. Region moves the number through labor rates, climate load, and local code; a Gulf Coast property works its air conditioning far harder than one in the upper Midwest. NAA's analysis attributes the recent increases to sustained inflation in maintenance repairs, appliances, and unit-turn-related work — pressure that hits every age, class, and region. The practical rule: adjust your expectation directionally before comparing, but never let age or region become the explanation of last resort. "The building is old" can be true and still conceal overpayment.
How to benchmark your own portfolio properly
Start by making your number comparable. Pull twelve months of R&M by property, strip out anything capitalized, and separate turn-related costs so you know what your ledger actually contains. Divide by unit count. Compare properties within your own portfolio first — same market, same coding conventions — because internal spread is more informative than distance from a national survey. A property running well above its siblings deserves attention regardless of what NAA reports. Then go below the category. Pull the invoices behind the largest GL lines and check what was bought, at what price, against what the same item sells for from verified suppliers. That is a multifamily invoice audit, and it is the only step in the sequence that measures overpayment rather than spending.
Line-item analysis answers what averages cannot
The question no benchmark can answer — did we pay the right price for what we bought? — is answerable at the invoice line. The Benchmark does exactly this: it reads every repairs-and-maintenance invoice a property pays, prices each line item at the SKU level against cheaper verified suppliers, and shows where the property overpaid and where to buy instead. Across that work, the average annual savings discovered for a 200-unit property is $22,546, and the average return on the product investment is 4.51x. A property can sit at the national average and still hold that much recoverable spend, because the average measures volume, not price. Category benchmarks tell you where to look. Line items tell you what to fix.
