The emergency furnace in January is only an emergency if nobody budgeted for the furnace. Maintenance doesn't surprise; it arrives on a schedule. What feels like a surprise is usually a budgeting failure wearing a repair's costume.
The rules of thumb — and their limits
- The 1% rule. Set aside 1% of property value per year. Simple, and usefully wrong: it swings with market values that have nothing to do with your roof.
- Per-unit figures. Commonly cited planning numbers run $50–100 per unit per month for routine maintenance, more for older stock.
- Per square foot. Roughly a dollar per square foot annually, same caveats.
All three are fine as rough reserve targets. None of them know how old your water heater is.
The budget that actually works: age-adjusted
Major systems have published service lives. Roofs run 20–30 years depending on material; water heaters 8–12; HVAC 15–20; major appliances around 10. Inventory the big systems with their ages and you have a capital plan: if the water heater is eleven years old, it isn't an "if" — it's a line item with a date range.
This is a fifteen-minute spreadsheet, and it eliminates most of what people call surprise.
Two budgets, not one
- Routine maintenance — filters, service calls, small repairs — belongs in the monthly operating line.
- The capital reserve — roofs, systems, big-ticket work — belongs in a separate account, fed monthly, spent rarely.
Keep them separate, or the reserve evaporates into a hundred small repairs and the roof arrives unbudgeted anyway.
Planned versus emergency pricing
January, no heat: emergency callout — after-hours labor, expedited parts, one bid
→September, scheduled: quoted price, three bids, off-peak scheduling
Scheduled work gets quoted; emergency work gets paid. After-hours labor rates, expedited parts, no time to collect competing bids, and you're negotiating in January from a position of weakness.
The seasonal calendar
- Spring: gutters and downspouts, grading check, AC service, exterior walk after winter.
- Summer: exterior caulk and paint, decks and fences, drainage.
- Fall: furnace service, gutter cleaning, sealing gaps, detector batteries.
- Winter: interior punch list, next year's capital planning.
Good maintenance budgeting makes repairs boring. That's the whole ambition.
A budget is only as good as the condition data under it: you can't schedule what you can't see, which is what periodic inspections are for (Kept's condition records exist largely to feed this — turning "surprise" into "scheduled" is most of the product).
The goal of a maintenance budget isn't to spend less, exactly. It's to convert emergencies into appointments. Good maintenance budgeting makes repairs boring. That's the whole ambition.