Where does the $8,657 per unit number come from?
The $8,657 figure comes from the 2024 Income/Expense IQ benchmarking report, published by the National Apartment Association with IREM and BOMA, drawing on more than one million units across 4,600-plus properties in 109 markets. The second anchor is a ratio: most stabilized multifamily properties run total operating expenses at 35–50% of effective gross income, a range cited consistently by lenders and analytics firms. Both numbers deserve a caveat. They are survey aggregates — self-reported data, blended across markets, vintages, and charts of accounts. They tell you what the industry spends on average. They cannot tell you whether your property is spending well. Treat them as orientation, not as a target.
What sits inside the per-unit total?
The same NAA data breaks the 2024 total into per-unit lines. Taxes and insurance: $2,998, with insurance alone at $777 after a 10.8% year-over-year increase. Administrative and payroll: $2,323. Utilities: $1,304. Repairs and maintenance: $1,098. Leasing: $292. Two things stand out. First, the largest buckets — taxes, insurance, and payroll — are set mostly by assessors, carriers, and labor markets, not by operating decisions. Second, the categories are not standardized across companies. One operator books unit turns to repairs and maintenance; another capitalizes them. One includes supplies in R&M; another breaks them out. That is why two properties with identical spending can report different line-item totals, and why category-level comparison across companies is looser than it looks.
Which expense lines can an operator actually influence?
Sort the lines by controllability and the picture changes. Property taxes are set by assessors; an appeal is an annual event, not an operating lever. Insurance is priced by carriers on risk and geography; shopping the renewal happens once a year. Payroll tracks the local labor market. That leaves the operational core: repairs and maintenance, supplies, unit turnover, and contract services — the roughly $1,098 per unit the NAA reports for R&M, plus the maintenance spending carried in other lines. These are the expenses decided in hundreds of small purchasing choices every month: which part, which supplier, at what price. They are the only major share of the budget where management effort changes the number this quarter, which is why serious cost work concentrates there. A fuller treatment of the levers is in how to reduce multifamily operating expenses.
The controllable share is thousands of small transactions
The controllable share behaves differently from the rest of the budget. Taxes arrive as one large bill. Repairs and maintenance arrives as a stream of small ones. At the NAA average of $1,098 per unit, a 200-unit property spends roughly $220,000 a year on R&M, spread across hundreds of invoices — parts, supplies, service calls, unit turns. Turnover alone averaged $3,872 per turned unit in Zego's survey of 630 property managers, as reported by Multifamily Dive. No single charge is worth a meeting. The aggregate carries real money. This is where overpayment hides: not in one bad contract, but in a few dollars of excess repeated across a thousand line items. See multifamily maintenance cost per unit for how the R&M number itself breaks down.
Why per-unit comparisons across markets mislead
A dollar-per-unit comparison across markets mostly measures geography, not management. Property taxes on the same asset can differ by multiples from one state to another. Insurance on a Gulf Coast property prices in hurricane exposure a Midwest property never pays. Payroll follows the local wage market. Utilities depend on who pays them — an owner-paid property books utility expense that a RUBS property passes through to residents. Add building age, unit size, and different charts of accounts, and two well-run properties can sit $2,000 per unit apart with neither one wasting money. The $8,657 national average blends all of it. Comparing your property to it, or to a portfolio in another market, produces a number that feels precise and means almost nothing. The comparison that means something is narrower: same market, same vintage — or, better, your own property over time.
Benchmark your portfolio against itself, not the average
The benchmark that holds up is internal, and it has two parts. First, trend: same property, same line items, quarter over quarter. R&M per unit rising at stable occupancy is a signal no national average can give you. Second, price level: not what the category cost, but what you paid for each item inside it, checked against what that item sells for from verified suppliers. A category can trend flat while every purchase inside it is priced above market — trend analysis will never see it. Trend catches drift. Price level catches overpayment that was there from the start. Together they answer the question a ratio cannot: not whether your spending is normal, but whether it is correct. The full method is covered in what expense benchmarking means in multifamily.
Where line-item analysis fits
Per-unit figures and expense ratios locate the problem area. Line-item analysis prices it. The work is mechanical: read every repairs-and-maintenance invoice the property paid, price each line item against verified suppliers, and total the difference between what was paid and what was available. The Benchmark does exactly this each quarter; across its analyses, the average annual savings discovered for a 200-unit property is $22,546 — a 4.51x average return on the cost of the product, backed by a money-back guarantee if verified potential savings do not reach the fee. Whether you build the discipline in-house or buy it, the sequence is the same: use the NAA averages and the 35–50% ratio to orient, use your own trend to find drift, and use invoice-level pricing to find the dollars.
