Deferred maintenance

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Deferred maintenance is a practice of allowing machinery or infrastructure to deteriorate by postponing prudent but non-essential repairs to save cost, labor and/or material. The failure to perform needed repair, maintenance, and renewal by normal maintenance management creates deferred maintenance. Generally, a policy of continuing deferred maintenance will result in higher costs or failure than if normal maintenance had occurred.

An example of deferred maintenance for a household would be putting off the recommended 1-year checkup on your car, or putting off the repairs recommended at that checkup: the car will not run as smoothly or efficiently and will be more likely to break down or crash. The term is usually used in the context of large organizations or governments, however.

Maintenance competes for funding with other programs and is often deferred because appropriations are not available or were redirected to other priorities or projects. Deferred maintenance is often not immediately reported -- and sometimes, not at all. Maintenance which is deferred because of insufficient funding may result in increased safety hazards, poor service to the public, higher costs in the future, and inefficient operations.