We know the feeling. One minute production is humming, and the next you’re scrambling to fix a critical failure while costs tick up by the second. Unplanned downtime disrupts production, stresses your team, and eats into already tight margins.
Work orders pile up, technicians chase the latest breakdown, and it becomes impossible to see what’s actually driving those lost hours.
Modern CMMS practices give you a way to bring order back to that chaos. You can schedule preventive maintenance, capture failure data consistently, and turn condition monitoring and Predictive Maintenance into everyday habits rather than side projects.
In this article, we look at recent maintenance statistics on:
- Unplanned downtime and cost per hour
- Safety incidents and lost time
- Adoption of condition monitoring and Predictive Maintenance
- Workforce supply in maintenance
- Documented outcomes from independent studies
Headline stats at a glance
- Unplanned downtime absorbs about 11% of annual revenue for large global manufacturers, around US$1.4 trillion a year.
- A typical large plant loses roughly US$253 million a year and about 27 hours a month to unplanned downtime, with hourly losses that can reach about US$2.3 million.
- Work injuries account for about US$176.5 billion in costs and 103 million lost days a year in the United States, and around 33.7 million lost days and £21.6 billion in costs in Great Britain.
- Maintenance and repair roles in the United States pay between about US$48,000 and US$64,000 a year and still show strong growth with tens of thousands of openings every year.
- Predictive Maintenance deployments report up to a 50% cut in unplanned downtime, around a 40% drop in maintenance costs, and modeled savings in the hundreds of billions at large enterprise scale.
The scale of the downtime problem
In 2024, a Siemens downtime study on the true cost of downtime (PDF) estimated that unplanned downtime costs Fortune Global 500 companies about 11% of their annual revenue, roughly US$1.4 trillion per year
A typical large plant in this group sees around US$253 million in downtime losses over a year. For small and mid-sized enterprises, downtime costs can reach up to US$150,000 per hour at the upper end.
Where losses show up - Cost per hour and long-term trend
Recent benchmarks show that a single hour of unplanned downtime can range from about US$36,000 in fast‑moving consumer goods to about US$2.3 million in automotive manufacturing, and that those costs have risen since 2019.
Cost per hour by sector
The Siemens downtime study from 2024 reports the following average cost per hour of unplanned downtime:
- Automotive manufacturing: about US$2.3 million per hour
- Fast‑moving consumer goods plants: around US$36,000 per hour
Change since 2019
The same study compares current exposure with 2019:
- Automotive downtime cost per hour is now around twice its 2019 level
- Heavy industry downtime cost per hour is roughly four times higher than in 2019
Are plants getting better at controlling downtime?
Recent safety and downtime figures indicate gradual improvements across many facilities. The same data shows that unplanned stops still remove meaningful capacity each month.
Safety incidents
In the U.S. private industry, the total recordable cases (TRC) rate fell, according to a 2023 Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational injuries and illnesses report:
- 2.7 cases per 100 full‑time equivalent workers in 2022
- 2.4 cases per 100 full‑time equivalent workers in 2023
Downtime incidents and hours lost
The Siemens downtime study reports changes in unplanned downtime for manufacturers in its sample between 2019 and 2024:
- Average unplanned downtime incidents per plant per month declined from 42 to 25
- Hours lost to unplanned downtime per month dropped from 39 to 27
What the trend means for plants
These shifts point to fewer accidents and fewer disruptive stoppages. Large plants in the Siemens study still lose more than a full day of output every month on average, so progress in safety and maintenance has not removed the impact of unplanned stops.
For maintenance and operations leaders, the picture looks like this:
- Incident counts move in a downward direction
- The hours lost per month remain material in many facilities
- Safety rates improve alongside equipment performance
What firms are adopting - Condition monitoring and PdM
Across manufacturers in the Siemens downtime study, about 9 out of 10 respondents report performing some form of condition monitoring, and almost half have a dedicated Predictive Maintenance team as of 2024.
A 2024 Manufacturers Alliance digital transformation in manufacturing report (PDF) adds a broader view of plant digitalization. In that survey, 51% of respondents reported deploying predictive analytics for data-driven supply chain planning, and 79% said they were already using or rolling out digital twin technology for product planning and development, including real-time quality monitoring.
OSHA's 2024 Top 10 most frequently cited standards list highlights the compliance side of this picture. For fiscal year 2024, the top cited standards across all industries were:
- Fall Protection, general requirements (29 CFR 1926.501)
- Hazard Communication, general industry (29 CFR 1910.1200)
- Ladders, construction (29 CFR 1926.1053)
- Respiratory Protection, general industry (29 CFR 1910.134)
- Control of Hazardous Energy (lockout/tagout), general industry (29 CFR 1910.147)
- Powered Industrial Trucks, general industry (29 CFR 1910.178)
- Fall Protection Training, construction (29 CFR 1926.503)
- Scaffolding, construction (29 CFR 1926.451)
- Eye and Face Protection, construction (29 CFR 1926.102)
- Machine Guarding, general industry (29 CFR 1910.212)
Taken together, these adoption and compliance figures show that maintenance and operations teams across these samples are building out condition monitoring, Predictive Maintenance, analytics, and documented procedures as part of everyday work rather than as experimental projects.
People and skills - Wages, growth, and openings
Maintenance performance depends on people who can diagnose faults, apply procedures safely, and keep equipment available on every shift. Recent wage, growth, and openings data points to sustained demand for these roles through the next decade.
General maintenance and repair workers (US)
The 2024–2025 Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook entry for general maintenance and repair workers gives the following picture:
- Median annual pay: US$48,620
- Estimated positions: about 1.63 million
- Projected employment growth: 4%
- Projected openings per year: about 159,800
Industrial machinery mechanics and related roles (US)
The 2024–2025 BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook profile for industrial machinery mechanics, machinery maintenance workers, and millwrights shows higher pay and faster growth:
- Median annual pay: US$63,510
- Estimated positions: about 538,300
- Projected employment growth: 13%
- Projected openings per year: about 54,200
Manufacturing workforce pipeline
The 2024 Manufacturing Institute report on the manufacturing workforce pipeline (PDF) lays out the longer-term needs for the sector:
- Estimated jobs to fill between 2024 and 2033: about 3.8 million
- Jobs that may remain unfilled: up to 1.9 million
Safety and lost time - The other drain on uptime
Safety events interrupt work, remove people from the floor, and add costs that sit alongside downtime losses. Recent figures from national safety bodies show how injuries and fatalities translate into lost days and financial exposure.
U.S. safety costs and incidence
The 2023 National Safety Council work injury cost estimates (Injury Facts) report the following for work injuries in 2023:
- Total estimated cost of work injuries: about US$176.5 billion
- Estimated days lost due to work-related injuries: about 103 million days
- Estimated cost per worker: about US$1,080 for the year
U.S. fatalities
According to a 2023 Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries news release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, fatal work injuries in the United States reached 5,283 cases in 2023, and the fatal injury rate stood at 3.5 deaths per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers.
These figures set a floor under the human and financial impact that safety incidents have in parallel with equipment downtime.
Great Britain - days lost and cost
The 2023/24 Health and Safety Executive key figures for Great Britain present the following headline numbers:
- Working days lost due to work-related illness and workplace injury in 2023/24: about 33.7 million days
- Estimated cost of injuries and ill health from current working conditions in 2022/23: about £21.6 billion
Compliance signal
OSHA's 2024 Top 10 most frequently cited standards list includes the Control of Hazardous Energy (lockout/tagout) standard, 29 CFR 1910.147, among the most frequently cited violations.
That same list highlights recurring issues with powered industrial trucks and machine guarding, areas that directly connect to maintenance planning and isolation steps.
Safety incidents, lost days, and compliance findings together broaden the case for disciplined maintenance. A structured approach to isolations, inspections, and corrective work not only supports uptime metrics but also reduces the likelihood and cost of events that remove people and equipment from productive work.
Practical playbook - How maintenance teams operationalize the response
Maintenance teams sit between financial exposure from downtime, safety expectations, and hiring limits. The practices below connect the statistics in this article to day-to-day maintenance work without promising results beyond those reported in the cited studies.
Asset register and criticality
- Build a complete asset register in a CMMS or other system, with unique identifiers for each line, system, and major component.
- Add criticality tags that reflect impact on safety, product quality, and lost production time.
- Start condition monitoring on assets marked as highly critical, in line with the high adoption of condition monitoring described in the 2024 Siemens downtime study.
Preventive maintenance scheduling
- Use calendar-based preventive maintenance for time-dependent tasks such as inspections and lubrication.
- Apply meter-based triggers, such as hours run, cycles, or starts, where runtime drives wear.
- Create standard preventive maintenance task lists for each asset type so technicians follow consistent steps on every visit.
Work orders and data capture
- Require work orders for planned and unplanned maintenance jobs, including breakdowns, safety-related stops, and inspections.
- Capture, for each job, the failure code or symptom, parts used, labour hours, and actual downtime minutes.
- Use standard fields so local incident counts and lost hours can be compared with benchmarks, such as Siemens' averages of 25 incidents and 27 hours lost per plant per month, as context rather than performance guarantees.
Failure analysis cadence
- Hold regular reviews of downtime events to group similar failures by asset, mode, or shift.
- Compare incident counts and hours from those reviews with the context figures from the Siemens downtime study, noting how far local exposure sits above or below the study averages.
- Log agreed corrective actions, such as changes to preventive maintenance tasks or spare strategies, and check at the next review if failure patterns have shifted.
Condition-based maintenance and Predictive Maintenance
- Start vibration or temperature routes on a small set of critical assets rather than trying to cover the full site at once.
- Record readings in the same system that holds work orders so each asset keeps a single history of failures, inspections, and condition data.
- Expand to continuous monitoring only where safety exposure or cost per hour justifies sensors and analysis effort.
- As adoption grows, create a small Predictive Maintenance focus group or designate technicians as PdM champions, reflecting the Siemens downtime study finding that about half of surveyed plants report dedicated PdM teams.
Compliance hardening
- Map maintenance tasks that involve isolation, testing, or restart steps against the Control of Hazardous Energy standard, 29 CFR 1910.147, which appears in OSHA's 2024 Top 10 most frequently cited standards list.
- Audit lockout and tagout procedures, observed field practice, and training records for alignment with those requirements.
- Update written procedures and toolbox talks so isolation steps remain clear and visible in daily work.
- Track and close corrective actions that emerge from internal safety audits or regulator inspections.
Case-level results reported in the literature
Documented outcomes from third-party reports set expectations for what can happen when condition monitoring and Predictive Maintenance become part of normal operations. These examples come from large manufacturers and should be treated as context, not as guarantees for any individual site.
Reported outcomes from PdM deployments
The 2024 Siemens downtime study on the true cost of downtime summarises results reported by clients using its Predictive Maintenance technology. According to that report, these deployments showed:
- An 85% improvement in downtime forecasting accuracy
- A 50% reduction in unplanned machine downtime
- A 55% increase in maintenance staff productivity
- A 40% reduction in maintenance costs
- Payback within about three months for large manufacturers
Modeled potential at Fortune Global 500 scale
Using those client results as a starting point, the same Siemens study models what full adoption of AI-driven machine-health monitoring across Fortune Global 500 industrial organisations could deliver:
- 2.1 million hours of downtime saved annually
- US$388 billion in savings through a 5% increase in productivity
- US$233 billion in savings through a 40% reduction in maintenance costs
Putting maintenance statistics into practice
Across the article, the figures point in the same direction. Unplanned downtime costs revenue at scale, safety incidents take people and capacity off the floor, and hiring data show that maintenance skills remain in demand even as teams struggle to grow headcount. Cost-per-hour benchmarks, trend lines for incidents and hours lost, adoption rates for condition monitoring and Predictive Maintenance, and workforce and safety losses all paint a single picture.
Plants incur financial and human exposure each time equipment stops, so structuring around assets, work orders, and condition data helps manage that exposure rather than chasing the next breakdown.
Taken together, the data in this article support a set of practical conclusions for maintenance and operations leaders:
- Downtime, safety incidents, and injuries sit on the same ledger as direct costs, lost hours, and missed orders
- Condition monitoring, Predictive Maintenance, and clear isolation procedures already appear across many plants, which means evidence and peer practices exist for teams that want to move in that direction
- Disciplined use of asset registers, scheduled work, and structured failure reviews turns statistics into daily maintenance habits that can reduce risk over time
We’d love to chat about your maintenance needs. Contact the Zoidii team to learn more about the next steps that make sense for your site.
References and data sources
- Siemens (2024). The True Cost of Downtime 2024 (PDF). https://assets.new.siemens.com/siemens/assets/api/uuid:1b43afb5-2d07-47f7-9eb7-893fe7d0bc59/TCOD-2024_original.pdf
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2023). Employer-Reported Workplace Injuries and Illnesses – 2023 (news release). https://www.bls.gov/news.release/osh.htm
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2023). National Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries in 2023 (news release). https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cfoi.nr0.htm
- National Safety Council (2023). Work Injury Costs – Injury Facts. https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/work/costs/work-injury-costs/
- Health and Safety Executive (2024). Health and safety statistics – Key figures for Great Britain 2023/24. https://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/overview.htm
- Occupational Safety and Health Administration (2024). OSHA Top 10 Most Frequently Cited Standards (FY 2024). https://www.osha.gov/top10citedstandards/
- Manufacturers Alliance (2024). Digital Transformation in Manufacturing (PDF). https://www.manufacturersalliance.org/sites/default/files/2024-05/DigitalTransformReport-F3.pdf
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2024). Occupational Outlook Handbook – General Maintenance and Repair Workers. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/installation-maintenance-and-repair/general-maintenance-and-repair-workers.htm
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2024). Occupational Outlook Handbook – Industrial Machinery Mechanics, Machinery Maintenance Workers, and Millwrights. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/installation-maintenance-and-repair/industrial-machinery-mechanics-and-maintenance-workers-and-millwrights.htm
- The Manufacturing Institute (2024). Digital Skills Report – Manufacturing Workforce Pipeline 2024–2033 (PDF). https://themanufacturinginstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Digital_Skills_Report_April_2024.pdf
