What Is Reactive Maintenance? (Types, Costs & Examples)

There are many different types of maintenance strategies teams can use — and in practice, most don’t choose just one.

But after working with several maintenance teams across manufacturing, facilities and property management, I see the same pattern repeat itself. Reactive maintenance usually starts as a cost-saving move, but then it quietly becomes the default.

In this guide, I’ll break down what reactive maintenance really looks like across industries, where it makes sense, where it backfires and how experienced teams balance it with preventive work.

What Is Reactive Maintenance?

With reactive maintenance, you fix a machine only after it breaks down. This is the opposite of a proactive maintenance strategy, which prevents issues before they start.

Reactive maintenance can be a good financial move. It requires less time and money upfront. But you never want to rely solely on a reactive strategy. In real operations, it shows up as backlogged work orders, after-hours callouts and repairs that interrupt production or tenant comfort. That’s why it’s not sustainable for valuable equipment. For critical assets, it’s a good idea to implement a mix of routine, reactive and preventive maintenance, strategies.

Though the idea of “reactive maintenance” sounds relatively straightforward, there are a few nuances among specific types of reactive maintenance. Let’s examine a few of those in depth.

Types of Reactive Maintenance

Reactive maintenance is an umbrella term for the following types of maintenance, all of which are responsive strategies to solve a pre-existing mechanical issue:

Breakdown Maintenance

Breakdown maintenance refers to action taken on a piece of equipment that won’t start or operate whatsoever. The machinery is completely broken and may require extensive repairs to run again (or may need to be replaced entirely).

In most cases, breakdown maintenance is unplanned. You need urgent repairs to get back to business. In the event of a stall or delay, the time in between can result in downtime. If possible, it’s always extremely helpful to have some kind of backup plan in place should an essential piece of equipment fail. This will serve to minimize losses.

What it looks like in practice: I see breakdown maintenance hurt teams when the asset is production-critical or customer-facing. Think packaging lines, elevators or commercial HVAC systems in which few hours of downtime snowball into missed revenue or complaints.

Run-to-Failure Maintenance

Run-to-failure (RTF) maintenance is deliberately allowing a machine to run until it breaks down. After the failure, reactive maintenance is performed — no prior or preventive maintenance is performed on the machine in advance.

The difference between RTF and breakdown maintenance is that RTF is always a deliberate decision. A maintenance plan is in place to repair the item without interrupting production. In addition, the equipment that is allowed to break down does not pose a health or safety risk to operating personnel.

A very simplistic example of RTF maintenance is allowing a light bulb to burn out before worrying about replacing it, but it can also refer to machinery that simply stops running on its own as part of a normal operational process. Instead of stopping everything for preventive maintenance, it makes more sense to wait for the machine to break on its own.

What it looks like in practice: In short, run-to-failure works best when failure is cheap, contained and predictable. But it can quickly become risky when teams underestimate how so-called “non-critical” equipment supports larger workflows or downstream processes.

Corrective Maintenance

Corrective maintenance is any type of action that targets and repairs a system malfunction so that equipment can be restored to proper working order. A major benefit is that a defect can be caught before it causes a total equipment breakdown.

That means corrective maintenance doesn’t require a totally busted asset. Rather, this strategy fixes defects in equipment that still works. This gives you time to respond and also fixes problems before they escalate.

Corrective maintenance is often performed on faulty parts that are discovered while other repairs are being made to the same machine. For instance, if you’re installing new carpeting in your office and discover mold growth beneath the old carpet, you would then take steps to understand and correct the conditions of such growth.

What this looks like in practice: In well-run operations, corrective maintenance highlights where experience pays off. Teams log the issue, schedule a targeted fix and prevent the defect from turning into a full breakdown. In less mature environments, these warning signs are documented but deprioritized, allowing minor issues to snowball into reactive emergencies later.

Emergency Maintenance

Emergency maintenance requires a last-minute response to the sudden breakdown of an asset. However, emergency maintenance entails some type of threat to health and safety (i.e., safety locks fail on a machine with hazardous moving parts).

Unlike breakdown maintenance, emergency maintenance is never planned, though businesses can have plans in place so that personnel is prepared in the event of an emergency. It’s always important to post emergency numbers in a high-traffic area and have a clear evacuation plan in place.

The best way to prevent an emergency is with planned and preventive maintenance routines. They help you find issues before they escalate to a crisis.

What this looks like in practice: Even organizations with strong maintenance programs still face emergencies, but the difference is preparedness. Clear escalation paths, documented procedures and accurate asset histories help reduce chaos when seconds matter.

Benefits of Reactive Maintenance

As with most maintenance strategies, there are pros and cons to the reactive approach. Here are three benefits of reactive maintenance:

1. Lower upfront costs: If you don’t typically invest in any type of preventive maintenance strategy for your assets, it’s undeniable that you’ll save some money on initial costs that you would have spent on preventive maintenance actions and labor costs. That said, relying only on reactive maintenance can be extremely costly for your business in the long run.
2. Fewer staff members needed: If you’re primarily concerned about responding to accidents and breakdowns when they occur, this also means that you’ll likely have a smaller maintenance team to run and manage equipment. Preventive maintenance requires staff to do weekly and monthly inspections, which means paying extra salaries.
3. No planning time necessary: Preventive maintenance requires planning and often allocates equipment downtime for inspections, part replacements and so on. Reactive maintenance means no planning, no scheduling and no equipment downtime up front. But you should expect unexpected downtime later.

Disadvantages of Reactive Maintenance

Reactive maintenance is most often associated with serious business disadvantages, and a maintenance management strategy that relies solely on reactive actions is not recommended. Here are five reasons why:

1. Unpredictable Budget

Unfortunately, reactive maintenance can be expensive. Urgent fixes often have additional costs for a quick turnaround. And if old equipment costs more to fix than to replace, you’ll spend an unpredictable amount on new machinery. Due to the likelihood of urgency, you may also end up spending more than you would if you’d had more time to compare costs from different vendors.

2. Unexpected Equipment Downtime

Perhaps the biggest disadvantage to reactive maintenance is unplanned downtime, which could cause business closures or a production halt. In manufacturing environments I’ve worked with, a single unplanned shutdown can wipe out an entire shift’s output — and if parts aren’t available, that downtime can stretch into days.

3. Overtime for Relevant Employees

On top of the initial cost, you may also have to pay overtime for employees. For instance, if there are one or two staff members who run the failed machine more frequently than anyone else, you may find you need their extensive knowledge about the broken equipment as you consider repairs.

4. Shorter Equipment Life Expectancy

If you only do enough to keep a valuable machine running, it will deteriorate much faster. This means you’ll have to replace the equipment faster, and its lifespan will be shorter than if you had taken the regular maintenance steps throughout the course of its lifecycle.

5. Higher Energy Costs

Typically, machines and equipment that aren’t properly maintained use more energy to run than well-maintained ones. Faulty appliances often mean much larger surges of electricity, which (depending on the equipment in question) can further damage the machine and possibly result in a higher electric bill.

Examples of Reactive Maintenance

Now that you know more about reactive maintenance, let’s review a few examples that would qualify:

• A school’s HVAC unit breaks down unexpectedly: A maintenance technician or facilities management team would be alerted to diagnose the cause of the failure. Depending on the failure’s root cause, the repair costs can vary greatly.
• A bearing is overheating inside a machine: Overheating is generally the cause of improper lubrication. The fix is simple typically low-cost and specific: Lubricate the bearing.
• A forklift is not raising or lowering properly: This may be an indication of hydraulic problems. In this case, the leaking cylinder would be repaired, and any defective spare parts would be replaced.
• A treadmill at the gym is malfunctioning: If the problem is not solvable by referring to the equipment’s manufacturer recommendations, a technician would need to restore the machine to safe and standard working condition.
• A restaurant’s dishwasher isn’t properly cleaning dishes and utensils: In this situation, a local repair company should come and inspect the dishwasher as soon as possible.

What It Means to Have Too Much Reactive Maintenance

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: It’s not a good idea to rely solely on reactive maintenance. Ideally, your business should incorporate a mix of preventive and reactive maintenance techniques. This may also be the most cost-effective solution.

For higher-value equipment and large machinery, you should perform routine maintenance and inspections to prevent costly breakdown repairs or equipment replacements. A good rule of thumb: If the risk of an asset’s breakdown is more costly than prevention, always employ preventive maintenance. Don’t wait for failure to take action.

I’ve seen this firsthand with Coast customers who came to us after years of reactive-only maintenance. Case in point: Save the Chimps is a nonprofit organization that specializes in the care of chimpanzees across 150 acres. The maintenance team is in charge of all facilities and equipment throughout the property, so they have 39 golf carts to help them get from Point A to Point B. But they were waiting until the golf carts would break down before fixing them. Once they started tracking reactive versus preventive work inside Coast, the imbalance became impossible to ignore.

How Much Does Reactive Maintenance Cost to Implement?

The costs associated with reactive maintenance vary greatly, depending on the scope of maintenance work required and the value of the item in question.

While it’s cheap at first, reactive maintenance can become very expensive. That’s especially true if a breakdown happens during peak production and requires after-hours assistance. Both of these become costly, time-consuming processes that perhaps were never factored into a budget or were never factored into production planning.

How Should Reactive Maintenance Fit Into a Maintenance Program?

Every business has a unique maintenance workflow — there is no one size fits all. If you rely on some type of reactive maintenance for one or more assets of your business or believe that certain reactive maintenance strategies may be right for you, start by calculating the value of your assets against your budget for repairs and maintenance. For the costly equipment you’ve listed, weigh the pros and cons of preventive maintenance versus reactive maintenance as a strategy for each.

For the most accurate financial projections and calculations, use a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) software or app to view the return on investment (ROI) you’re accruing by implementing preventive maintenance on one or more of your assets. When teams use a CMMS like Coast, they can actually see how much reactive maintenance is costing them — in overtime hours, emergency work orders and asset downtime. I regularly hear from maintenance managers who assumed reactive work was “just part of the job” until they pulled the data and saw how little planned work was getting done.

In addition to helping you track your ROI and determining your maintenance budget, maintenance software also helps with work order management and allows you to create and submit digital work order forms in one streamlined system. Several of these programs even include templates and checklists, so that employees can fill out such forms quickly on their own. Better yet, CMMS software will help with asset inventory management and real-time tracking of asset performance to help you make more informed decisions about your maintenance strategy moving forward.

Botton Line: When to Use Reactive vs. Preventive Maintenance

Reactive maintenance can be an effective part of your maintenance strategy for businesses across various industries. However, you should never rely solely on reactive maintenance as a solution for all asset breakdowns. Analyze your budget, take note of your most valuable machinery, and determine where reactive maintenance might be the right choice for you. After all, the most resilient maintenance teams don’t eliminate reactive work — they control it.

This article was originally published in August 2020. The most recent update was in February 2026.