Preventive Maintenance Compliance: Your Definitive Guide

We all know the rush of a reactive breakdown. A major asset goes down, and suddenly, maintenance technicians start scrambling, throwing parts at the problem and creating chaos on the floor. While that quick fix might save the day, it’s a symptom of a larger, more expensive failure: low preventive maintenance compliance.

If you run a preventive maintenance program, your ultimate goal is equipment reliability. You want equipment running efficiently and safely to meet production goals. However, if your team skips or delays scheduled inspections and lubrication tasks — the core of your preventive maintenance (PM) program — you are gambling with asset uptime. Every skipped PM task is an open invitation for a major, unscheduled failure. Ignoring PM compliance today guarantees you’ll pay for it tenfold tomorrow in costly repairs, lost production and a demoralized team caught in a reactive cycle.

What Is Preventive Maintenance Compliance?

In the simplest terms, preventive maintenance compliance is the most important measure of your team’s execution against its maintenance strategy. It’s the percentage of all scheduled PM tasks that your maintenance team successfully completes on time.

Think of it as the grade on your maintenance report card. If you schedule 100 PM tasks for the month, and you only complete 70 of them, you have a 70 percent compliance rate. This key performance indicator (KPI) tells maintenance managers and reliability teams whether they are effectively controlling their assets or if their assets are controlling them. The industry benchmark for a reliable operation is a PM compliance rate of 90 percent or higher. Failing to hit that number means you are likely dedicating too many hours to reactive maintenance.

Calculating Your PM Compliance Rate

To be truly compliant, a task must be more than simply completed; it must be completed within a specific, accepted time window. This is where the reliability world uses a principle called the 10% Rule.

The 10% Rule is the industry standard for measuring if a preventive maintenance task was completed in-tolerance. If you schedule a PM to occur every 30 days, the maintenance job must be executed within 10 percent (plus or minus) of that interval to be compliant.

For a 30-day PM, this means:

• $30 days X 0.10 = 3 of tolerance
• The maintenance task must be completed between Day 27 and Day 33.

If the technician completes the task on Day 26, it was done too early and may waste time. If they complete it on Day 34, it was late and failed to mitigate the risk. In both cases, it is considered non-compliant.

PM Compliance Rate = Number of PMs Completed and In-Tolerance / Total Number of Scheduled PMs X 100

The formula for PM Compliance is straightforward, but tracking the “in-tolerance” part is what separates manual tracking from smart CMMS tools.

The Compliance Crossroads: Why High PM Compliance Is Essential

PM compliance is not just a vanity metric; it’s the cornerstone of your operational health. Ignoring it is like waiting for your car’s check engine light to turn on before changing the oil. Here are several reasons why a higher PM compliance rate is important:

Improved Asset Uptime

When we stick to the schedule, we are consistently catching small problems — a loose belt, a dry bearing, an electrical spike — before they cascade into critical equipment failures. High compliance directly translates to a lower frequency of unscheduled downtime. The reliability team relies on this consistency to keep the facility running.

Extended Asset Lifespan

Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) provide recommended maintenance schedules to maximize the life of the asset. When you maintain high PM compliance, you ensure that vital components, such as seals and motors, are replaced or serviced at the optimal time, adhering to those manufacturer guidelines. This is key to maximizing the value of your capital investment.

Regulatory & Safety Compliance

For many industries, certain maintenance and inspection tasks are legally mandated, especially around fire suppression, boilers or pressure vessels. A high PM compliance rate provides a verifiable audit trail. That way, if an auditor or safety inspector asks to see the maintenance record for a critical piece of equipment, you can quickly demonstrate due diligence and reduce corporate liability. 

Better Budget Forecasting

When your PM compliance rate is low, your team is constantly being pulled into unplanned, reactive maintenance. This emergency work is always more expensive and harder to budget for. With high PM compliance, your maintenance planner can accurately forecast labor hours, parts inventory and capital investment spending.

A 5-Step Action Plan to Implement & Track PM Compliance

If you know your compliance rate is flagging, you need an actionable maintenance process, not just more promises. The following five steps are essential for driving the rate up past the 90 percent benchmark.

Step 1: Define Your Compliance Window

First, you must formally adopt the 10% Rule for all rotating equipment and production assets. You need to standardize this with your team. For every PM task, the maintenance manager must clearly indicate the due date and the final compliant date. This removes ambiguity about what “on time” truly means.

Step 2: Audit & Standardize PM Procedures

A PM is only as good as the instructions attached to it. Every recurring PM should have an attached standard operating procedure (SOP) that defines the required steps, tools and estimated timeframe to complete the task. If a technician is missing an SOP or the procedure is unclear, they will skip it or delay the work order.

Step 3: Schedule With Resource Reality

You cannot schedule 100 hours of PM work if your team only has 80 hours of available time this week. One of the biggest pitfalls we see is overloading technicians with maintenance activities. Your PM schedule must be based on a realistic assessment of your available labor hours, subtracting time for unavoidable reactive work, meetings and training.

Step 4: Use a Mobile-First Maintenance Software

You need a system that makes PM work easier to close than to skip. Your technicians should not have to walk back to the office to check off a clipboard. Coast’s mobile-first design means a technician can receive, execute and close out a PM on their phone or tablet right at the asset. This real-time update capability is essential for accurate compliance tracking.

Step 5: Review & Iterate

Compliance is not set-it-and-forget-it. At the end of every week, the maintenance manager must review the PM compliance dashboard. Look for recurring patterns such as:

• Which PMs are consistently late? (Perhaps they need more time or better parts availability.)
• Which technicians are struggling? (Perhaps they need clearer training or an updated SOP.)
• Are we over-scheduling? (Revisit Step 3.)

Critical Factors for Improving Your PM Compliance Rate

Implementing the steps above is just the beginning. To reach and sustain 90 percent compliance, you need to leverage the right tools and internal workflows. These include:

Better Communication

Compliance often fails due to a breakdown in communication. The maintenance manager assigns the task, but the technician doesn’t have a critical part or runs into an unexpected disruption. Instead of dropping the task to chase down the manager, your system should allow for real-time messaging directly within the work order. This keeps all conversations — and accountability — attached to the specific job, reducing delays.

Digital Accessibility

We cannot overstate this: PM instructions must be immediately accessible in the field. For instance, the ability to use QR codes for asset management is a huge benefit. A technician can simply scan a code affixed to a pump or HVAC unit with their phone, and the PM checklist, schematics and full historical data are immediately displayed. This saves valuable time and improves real-time data accuracy, which feeds directly into improving your overall compliance score and managing your asset inventory.

Automate Your Deadlines

Manual tracking of PM deadlines is prone to error. You need a system that handles the heavy lifting. Features like automated PM notifications, dashboards and alerts that signal when a PM is overdue are crucial. This moves compliance from a spreadsheet audit to an automated visual check.

Customize Workflows

No two maintenance teams are alike. The workflow for apartment maintenance is vastly different from that of a manufacturing plant. The best software is not one-size-fits-all; it must give you the flexibility to customize various asset lifecycle workflows to match your existing preventive maintenance operations. This ensures that the system works for your team, not the other way around.

Coast: Customize Your Path to Better PM Compliance

The right computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) software is the engine for achieving consistent PM compliance. Coast was designed to eliminate the common friction points that lead to missed deadlines and low execution rates. We built the platform to give maintenance teams the flexibility to customize their own software and streamline proactive maintenance work, which is why it excels at asset tracking.

One standout feature is Coast’s customizable asset lifecycle workflows. Unlike rigid, complex enterprise systems, Coast allows you to dictate how maintenance tasks flow from creation to completion, ensuring the process matches your specific needs. For a multi-site property manager, this means tailoring workflows to ensure every HVAC inspection hits its mark on time, thereby reducing energy costs.

Furthermore, Coast’s mobile-first design is critical. The ability to attach SOPs, safety documents and checklists directly to a work order via QR codes for easy external service requests made the process nearly foolproof. This commitment to simple, flexible execution makes PM compliance a habit, not a burden. It helps your team achieve reliable, documented compliance for service contract accountability and effective work order management.

Case in point: Coast Customer Lisa Bosworth, the head of quality and continuous improvement for Solmet Group, credited Coast with her team’s ability to complete work orders five times faster.  “We’ve been able to optimize our maintenance scheduling and decrease downtime with this more comprehensive preventive maintenance strategy,” she says. “Because the PMs are more in-depth now, we’re catching things before they’re happening.”

Beyond Compliance: Other Key Maintenance Metrics

PM compliance is a critical metric, but it’s one star in a constellation of measures that define a high-performing maintenance team. To get a holistic view, you must look at others:

• Reactive vs. preventive maintenance ratio: The industry goal is 80 percent PM and 20 percent reactive maintenance. If your ratio is inverted, your team is perpetually in crisis mode.
• Mean time to repair (MTTR): This measures how quickly your team can return an asset to operational status after a breakdown. A high MTTR indicates poor troubleshooting or a lack of necessary spare parts.
• Mean time between failure (MTBF): This reliability metric measures the average time that an asset runs without incident or breakdown. It is calculated by dividing the total operating time by the number of failures over a specific period.
• Asset downtime: This is the total time an asset is non-operational due to failure. It’s the ultimate cost metric for the business, but a high PM compliance rate should drive this number consistently down.
• Work order backlog: This refers to the number of hours of work waiting to be assigned. A growing backlog suggests you need more resources or more effective preventive maintenance scheduling.

These metrics give maintenance managers a complete picture, ensuring that when they hit 90 percent PM compliance, it translates into real-world maintenance cost savings and reliability.

Conclusion: Compliance Is About Culture, Not Just Numbers

Preventive maintenance compliance is not simply a number you report to executives; it is a measure of your team’s discipline and a predictor of your facility’s future reliability. The teams that excel treat compliance as a cultural mandate, supported by tools that make it easy to follow the plan. By adopting the 10% Rule, standardizing your processes and leveraging a flexible preventive maintenance software like Coast, you can move from reactive chaos to proactive control.

Ready to start managing your assets and driving your compliance rate to 90 percent and beyond? Sign up for a free account of Coast today.