Budget your fleet's annual maintenance spend across preventive service, repairs, tires and downtime.
How the model splits maintenance
Maintenance spend divides into planned and unplanned. Preventive maintenance is scheduled by mileage interval (oil, filters, inspections, adjustments), so the calculator derives the number of services per truck from your annual miles and interval. Unplanned repairs are entered per mile because they broadly scale with use. Tires get their own annual line, and downtime is priced separately because a truck in the shop costs revenue even when the repair itself is cheap.
Benchmarks to steer by
ATRI's 2026 report put industry-average repair and maintenance at 40.4 cents per mile in 2025, an 8.6 percent rise on the prior year and one of the fastest-growing cost lines, with tires adding 5 cents per mile. If your combined per-mile figure lands far above those numbers, aging equipment or deferred preventive work is usually the reason; far below, and you may be storing up unplanned failures. The downtime line is the one most fleets underestimate: at typical revenue levels a truck-day off the road costs more than most repairs.
Reducing the total
The reliable levers are disciplined preventive intervals (skipping PM to save money reliably costs more in repairs), tire pressure and alignment programs, telematics fault-code monitoring to catch issues early, and tracking cost per mile by vehicle so the money-pit trucks reveal themselves. Fleet management systems that automate service scheduling are compared in our fleet management guide.
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