What Understaffed Maintenance Teams are Costing Industrial Companies

Most conversations about the skilled labor shortage in maintenance focus on the hiring problem. That makes sense, especially when 55% of under-staffed teams are shorthanded because they can’t find qualified candidates, according to a survey of 211 maintenance leaders.

But it also misses another critical component of the labor shortage, which is how much it’s costing industrial companies. When a maintenance team is running below capacity, it shows up across the operation, from lost production to higher costs and long-term risk to asset performance.

In our latest report on the skilled labor shortage, more than 70% of industrial maintenance teams were understaffed at least sometimes in the last 12 months, while 37% were chronically understaffed (often or almost always shorthanded). This article explores why this is a massive threat to the immediate and long-term health of industrial companies, and how to mitigate the risks of short-staffed maintenance teams.

Cost #1: Unplanned downtime

The most visible cost of understaffing is downtime. When there are not enough skilled staff to maintain critical assets, work gets pushed, small issues get worse, failure goes unidentified, and equipment sits unavailable for longer.

There’s a clear impact in the data: 46% of chronically understaffed maintenance teams say unplanned downtime is increasing because they are shorthanded. That increased unplanned downtime has a ripple effect, reducing everything from output to capacity, and cost per unit. 

Picture what that looks like on the floor. A machine goes down during a critical run. The maintenance team is already stretched thin. The person who knows that asset best is answering another urgent call all the way across the facility. The line sits quiet for hours, threatening a key order while rush shipping and idle operators increase costs.

That lost time may not appear in the budget as an “understaffing cost.” But it’s there. It shows up in lower throughput, missed capacity, premium freight, schedule changes, and the margin that disappears when production does not hit plan.

Cost #2: Contractor spend

Many maintenance teams turn to contractors when they can’t hire fast enough. That can be the right move in the moment. It keeps work moving and helps to cover specialized jobs. But the more you rely on contractors to fill in-house capacity, the higher your costs will get. This is the situation that 48% of maintenance teams find themselves in, according to the survey.

The obvious cost is the rate. Contractors often cost more per hour than internal labor. But the rate card is only part of the story. Contractors don’t usually have the same institutional knowledge as your internal team. They may not know the history of a problem asset or the workaround that keeps a line running. They may need more direction, supervision, or time to understand your processes.

They also don’t build the same long-term capability inside the team. That matters because maintenance often relies on learning assets, improving procedures, capturing what happened, and making the next job easier. When too much work shifts outside the team, the organization may get the immediate repair but lose the chance to strengthen its own operating knowledge.

Contractors solve a capacity gap, but not a capability gap. That matters when contractor spend becomes a standing part of the staffing plan instead of a temporary bridge. At that point, the business may be paying more without becoming more resilient.

Cost #3: Overtime

Overtime is another common way teams absorb staffing gaps. When there’s more work than the team can cover, the fastest answer is to ask the people you already trust to work more hours. They know everything about the assets and workflows, so they can respond quickly. But, just like contractor costs, overtime can get out of hand quickly.

The survey found that 43% of teams are running more overtime to cope with staffing shortages. That raises direct labor costs, but the bigger issue is what overtime does across months and quarters. The same data shows that 41% of teams using overtime cited higher-than-average turnover as a reason for staffing shortages, compared to 27% of teams that were not using overtime this way.

The danger of relying on overtime as a long-term staffing strategy is that it adds costs while increasing the risk of making labor gaps worse. A few extra shifts can help a team get through a rough patch. Months of extra shifts can burn people out.

Overtime is supposed to help the team keep up. But when it becomes the default, it can accelerate the exact problem it was meant to solve.

Cost #4: Deferred maintenance work

The fourth cost is deferred work, which is often the easiest to miss because it doesn’t always hit your monthly budget. At first, the tradeoff between emergency repairs and missed inspections can look reasonable. If a critical asset is down, the team should focus there. But when deferral becomes routine, risk starts to accumulate.

The survey found that over 60% of chronically understaffed teams are deferring lower-priority work, increasing the risk of future failures. This is why deferred maintenance is so dangerous financially. It often looks like savings in the short term because the labor was not spent today. But the bill does not disappear, but instead comes due weeks or months down the line in the form of breakdowns, safety incidents, and missed deliveries.

The longer a team stays understaffed, the more this risk compounds. Instead of low-cost preventive work, you end up with expensive and disruptive last-minute repairs. Deferred maintenance isn’t free. It’s delayed cost with interest.

The long-term financial impact of understaffed maintenance teams

The worst consequence of the skilled labor shortage in maintenance is that each cost feeds the others. A team runs short, so routine maintenance is deferred. Deferred work increases the chance of asset failure, which leads to unplanned downtime and more overtime to get breakdowns fixed as fast as possible. Overtime increases turnover risk, creating more staffing gaps and contractor use. The team falls further behind, and more work gets deferred.

Hiring alone is often not enough to stop this loop. That is especially true when roles take months to fill and new technicians take months to ramp. By the time a new hire is fully productive, the team may have already absorbed additional downtime, overtime, contractor cost, and backlog growth.

This is the real financial problem. The cost of a staffing gap is not limited to the open role. It includes everything the organization does to survive that gap.

The teams breaking the cycle are reducing the cost of each gap

Maintenance teams still need to hire. There is no way around that. But the teams in the strongest position are not waiting for hiring to solve everything. They are investing in systems that reduce how much each staffing gap costs them.

That starts with making work easier to plan, execute, document, and repeat. It means capturing knowledge before experienced technicians leave and standardizing procedures so new hires ramp faster. It requires giving frontline teams quick access to asset history, work instructions, and the information they need at the point of work.

It also means turning maintenance data into a better business case. If staffing shortages are increasing downtime, overtime, contractor spend, and deferred maintenance risk, leaders need to see those costs clearly. Otherwise, the shortage keeps getting treated as a nuisance instead of an operational and financial constraint.

The goal is to make the labor you have more scalable, consistent, and protected from the worst effects of being shorthanded. Because the skilled labor shortage is not only about how many open roles you have. It is about how expensive those openings become while the work still has to get done.