Rental Property Maintenance, by the Numbers: What 193,000+ Work Orders Reveal

Maintenance is one of the biggest recurring costs on a rental portfolio and the one most landlords have the least visibility into. We pulled more than 193,000 first-party rental maintenance requests from our platform, spanning eight years and all 50 states, and looked at three things: what tenants actually report, how long repairs take to close, and how much faster requests resolve when a service team coordinates them rather than the landlord.

The key findings:

• Plumbing is 1 in 4 maintenance requests and stays #1 even after the messy "Other" bucket is cleaned up. The top four categories (plumbing, HVAC, appliance, and electrical) account for roughly 70% of every work order in the dataset.
• Resolution time varies 4x across categories. Locksmith work closes fastest (median 7.9 days). Roof repair closes slowest (median 33.9 days). Emergency-adjacent work is fast; capital-intensive work is slow.
• Hemlane-coordinated repairs resolve in 10.1 days, median, 31% faster than self-managed ones (14.7 days). Coordination wins across every category we measured, with the biggest gaps in vendor-sourcing-heavy work.
• Tenants submit 3.3 maintenance requests per unit per year, and the number is climbing. Across 2024, requests per unit per year averaged 3.30, up from 2.93 in 2020. At a rough industry estimate of $200 per request, that is roughly $660 per unit per year in ongoing maintenance spending, not counting major repairs or renovations.

This guide walks through what those 193,000 requests show about what breaks, how long fixes take, and where coordinated maintenance moves the numbers.

Plumbing is the Most Common Request

The category breakdown is more concentrated than most landlords expect.

The first thing to flag is the "Other" bucket. At 21.5% of all closed requests, it rivals plumbing for the headline. We pulled every "Other" or NULL-category request title and ran keyword analysis: about 70% of them can be remapped to existing categories. Most of the "Other" volume is actually doors and locks, plumbing, interior surfaces (drywall, paint, flooring), or windows, just submitted with titles that did not match the category dropdown.

After remapping, the true "Other" bucket falls to roughly 6 to 7% of total volume. Plumbing's dominance only grows. The clean read of the data is that plumbing, HVAC, appliance, and electrical account for about 70% of every maintenance call a landlord will ever take. Those four are where vendor relationships matter most.

Resolution Time Varies 4x Across Categories

Median resolution time varies sharply by category. The emergency-adjacent categories (locksmith, HVAC, plumbing) close fastest. Capital-intensive categories (roof repair, general contracting) close slowest. The spread is roughly 4x from fastest to slowest.

The pattern is straightforward. Categories that arrive with clear scope and built-in urgency (a tenant locked out, a furnace down in January, water on the floor) get resolved fast because everyone in the chain treats them as urgent. Categories that involve estimates, owner approvals, multiple visits, or weather windows (a roof, a contractor remodel, gutter work) take three to four times longer because the calendar fills with handoffs.

The two takeaways for a landlord setting SLAs with vendors: target ~10 days on emergency-adjacent work, and budget two to four times that for capital-intensive work. Anything outside those ranges deserves a closer look.

Median Time to Close is More Useful than Average

You may have noticed the table above uses median resolution time, not average. There is a reason, and it matters when you pull your own maintenance log to compare.

Resolution time across the full dataset has a long right tail. Half of all requests close inside 14 days. The slowest 10% stretch past 4 months. A handful of extreme cases past 7 months drag the simple average up to roughly 50 days, even though that number does not describe the typical repair on anyone's portfolio.

A landlord who exports their own maintenance log and averages the days-to-close column will land near 50 days too and assume their operation is in trouble. It is almost certainly not. The right operational question is not "what is our average," it is "what is our median, and how thick is our long tail." Use the median to set vendor SLAs and tenant expectations; use the average only when you need a portfolio-level dollar figure for budgeting, and even then, know that a few outliers are doing most of the lifting.

Hemlane-Coordinated Repairs Resolve 31% Faster

The single largest gap in the data is not between categories. It is between repairs that ran through Hemlane's coordinated maintenance service and repairs that landlords managed themselves on the platform.

Hemlane-coordinated repairs resolve at a median of 10.1 days. Self-managed repairs resolve at a median of 14.7 days. That is 31% faster. Coordination wins across every category we measured, with the biggest gaps in vendor-sourcing-heavy work: locksmith (48% faster), electrical (33%), handywork (32%).

Hemlane's coordinated maintenance is a defined service tier, not a generic coordination label. A repair coordinator on Hemlane's team takes the tenant's request, dispatches a vendor from the vetted local network in the right market, manages tenant communication through the lifecycle, and tracks the request to closure. The service runs 24/7 across all 50 states. The numbers above compare requests that ran through this service tier against requests the landlord managed themselves on the platform.

Color Findings: Property Type, Geography, and Frequency

A few additional patterns are worth flagging without overclaiming.

Single-family vs multifamily. Resolution times are remarkably similar across single-family and multifamily properties. Plumbing closes in 9.9 days for both. HVAC closes about a day faster for single-family (9.0 vs 10.0). Differences across the rest of the categories are typically under two days and are category-specific, not structural. Property type does not predict resolution time at the portfolio level.

HVAC seasonality is climate-driven, not calendar-driven. Northern and Midwestern markets peak in January when the heat goes out. Sun Belt markets peak between May and August when AC fails. Western markets peak in June and July. If you manage a mixed-climate portfolio, vendor capacity needs to be pre-seasoned in different months for different markets.

Plumbing resolution time varies 2x by state. Ohio resolves plumbing fastest at 7.9 days median. Nevada is slowest at 14.7. California (11.1), New York (11.3), and Florida (9.9) all sit in the middle. The variation is real and worth knowing if you operate across states, but no state shows the kind of long tail that would dominate a portfolio average.

Tenants submit 3.3 maintenance requests per unit per year, and the number is climbing. Across 2024, requests per unit per year averaged 3.30, up from 2.93 in 2020. Single-family properties run slightly higher (3.40) than multifamily (3.23), likely because single-family tenants report all issues directly while multifamily tenants sometimes interact with on-site staff for minor items.

What This Means for Your Portfolio

The right move on maintenance depends on the portfolio you actually run. The table below maps the data to action.

For operators running across multiple states or through a brokerage's property management arm, the value compounds with standardization: consistent SLAs by category, automated tenant updates, and owner-level reporting that surfaces response time and cost per unit each month.

About Hemlane

Hemlane is property management software with a built-in service layer. The platform runs the full rental workflow (rent collection, leasing, maintenance, and accounting), and on its paid tiers it adds real people behind the software: 24/7 repair coordination, dedicated leasing coordinators, and a vetted local vendor network across all 50 states. That combination of software plus service is what separates Hemlane from software-only tools.

For the maintenance findings in this study, the features that make the data actionable are:

• 24/7 repair coordination with a real coordinator dispatching vendors, handling tenant communication, and tracking closure. This is the cohort behind the 31% faster median in the data above.
• Vetted local vendor network across all 50 states, which closes the availability gap for remote landlords and brokerages without local vendor relationships.
• Fair-housing-trained tenant communications, so the conversation with the tenant on a repair is handled by someone who knows the rules.
• Per-portfolio response-time reporting, so brokerages can show owners the SLA, not just promise one.

Hemlane serves operators running roughly 10 to 200 units, across single-family and multifamily portfolios. That includes property management groups scaling their door count, real estate investors and brokerages adding property management as a service line, remote and out-of-state landlords, single-family investors with portfolios across multiple markets, and landlords scaling from DIY to operator. State-specific lease templates across all 50 states, 24/7 repair coordination, and online rent collection all run from the same platform.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How long does the average rental property repair take?

Across 193,000+ first-party rental maintenance requests, the median repair resolves in 13.1 days. The average is 50.2 days, but the average is pulled up by a long tail of multi-month outliers. The median is the more useful benchmark for the typical repair.

What are the most common rental property maintenance requests?

Plumbing is the most common category at 25.4% of all work orders, followed by HVAC (12.3%), appliance repair (12.2%), and electrical (8.4%). After cleaning up the "Other" bucket (where about 70% of requests can be re-mapped to existing categories), plumbing's lead grows. The top four categories account for roughly 70% of every maintenance request in the dataset.

How long does it take to fix a plumbing issue in a rental?

The median plumbing repair in the dataset resolves in 9.9 days. Performance varies by state: Ohio is fastest at 7.9 days, Nevada is slowest at 14.7. The category as a whole runs faster than the 13.1-day all-category median because plumbing issues tend to arrive with urgency built in.

How long does it take to fix HVAC in a rental property?

The median HVAC repair resolves in 9.6 days. HVAC has the strongest seasonality of any category in the data: Northern and Midwestern markets peak in January (heating failures), Sun Belt markets peak May through August (AC failures), and Western markets peak in June and July. Vendor capacity should be pre-seasoned to match the regional pattern.

Do Hemlane-coordinated repairs really resolve faster than self-managed ones?

In Hemlane's dataset, yes. Hemlane-coordinated repairs resolve at a 10.1-day median versus 14.7 for self-managed (31% faster). The largest category-level gaps are in vendor-sourcing-heavy work: locksmith (48% faster), electrical (33%), and handywork (32%). The gap is consistent across every category we measured.

How many maintenance requests does a rental unit average per year?

The 2024 benchmark is 3.3 maintenance requests per unit per year, up from 2.93 in 2020. Single-family properties run slightly higher (3.40) than multifamily (3.23). At roughly $200 average per request, expect about $660 per unit per year in ongoing maintenance spending, before any major repairs or renovations.

Methodology

This analysis is based on first-party data from our production database covering August 2018 through May 2026. The primary dataset is more than 193,000 maintenance requests, of which 178,780 were closed at the time of analysis. Resolution time is measured as the elapsed wall-clock time from "created_at" (when the tenant or owner submitted the request) to the "updated_at" timestamp when the request status changed to "Closed." Wall-clock time includes idle periods (waiting for parts, tenant availability, owner approval); it is not active-work time. Reopened requests show the last closure timestamp, not the first, which inflates resolution time slightly for the small share of requests that were reopened. The "Other" remapping was done by keyword analysis of the request title field. The "Hemlane-coordinated" cohort consists of requests routed through Hemlane's coordinated maintenance service tier; the "self-managed" cohort consists of requests managed by the landlord on the platform without coordination. All figures are first-party data; no third-party sources were used, and no personally identifying tenant information was included. Where sample sizes are small for a sub-cut (e.g. specific states for a specific category), we have noted it inline or omitted the cut.