The Maintenance Overtime Question Nobody Asks
There's a moment in every plant where overtime stops being an exception and starts being the plan. Nobody announces it. It just happens. The roster assumes it. The budget expects it. The team depends on the income.
And once it becomes structural, nobody questions it anymore. It's just how things work around here.
That's the problem.
Two kinds of maintenance overtime
Not all overtime is the same, and the distinction matters.
Spike overtime is what happens when something unexpected hits. A major breakdown, a shutdown overrun, a customer deadline that moved forward. It's temporary, it's visible, and it usually has a clear cause. This kind of overtime is normal. Every plant will have it from time to time.
Structural overtime is different. It's the 10, 12, or 15 hours per person per week that happens every week regardless of what's going on. It's baked into the roster. It's expected in the budget. It's not responding to any specific event. It's just there.
Structural overtime is what happens when the plant doesn't have enough capacity during straight time to handle its workload. But instead of fixing the workload or the capacity, overtime fills the gap permanently.
Why most plants don't question structural overtime
Three reasons.
The team wants it. Overtime income is significant, and taking it away creates industrial noise. Managers avoid the conversation because it's uncomfortable.
It's in the budget. If overtime has been running at the same level for two or three years, it's been normalised in the financial plan. It doesn't show up as a variance. It doesn't trigger any alarms. It just looks like the cost of doing business.
Nobody's done the maths. Most plant managers can tell you their overtime hours but can't tell you what structural overtime is costing as a separate line item. It gets blended into total labour cost and disappears.
What structural overtime actually costs your plant
Let's run a simple example.
Say you've got 20 maintenance staff. Each person averages 12 hours of overtime per week. Your loaded overtime premium (the additional cost above straight time, including super and on-costs) is $35 per hour.
20 staff x 12 hours x $35 premium x 52 weeks = $436,800 per year in premium alone.
That's not the total overtime cost. That's just the premium you're paying on top of what straight-time labour would have cost. The total overtime spend is much higher.
Now ask yourself: is that $436,800 delivering $436,800 in value? Or is it masking a planning problem, a scheduling problem, or a workload problem that could be solved a different way?
In most plants I've assessed, at least half of structural overtime is avoidable. It's being driven by poor schedule compliance, excessive reactive work, inefficient work practices, or a backlog that's never been properly prioritised.
How to start reducing structural maintenance overtime
You don't need to slash overtime tomorrow. You need to understand it first.
Step 1: Separate structural from spike overtime
Look at your overtime data for the last 12 months. Strip out any weeks with known shutdowns or major events. What's left is your structural baseline. If it's consistently above 8 hours per person per week, you've got a structural problem.
Step 2: Put a dollar figure on the overtime premium
Use the calculation above. Multiply your average structural OT hours by headcount, by your loaded premium rate, by 52. That's your annual cost of structural overtime premium. Share that number with your GM. Most of them have never seen it isolated like that.
Step 3: Identify the root causes
Structural overtime almost always traces back to a small number of causes: too much reactive work, poor planning and scheduling, inefficient use of straight time, or a workload that genuinely exceeds capacity. Each one has a different fix, and some don't cost anything to implement.
Step 4: Set a 90-day reduction target
Don't try to eliminate overtime. Try to reduce structural overtime by 20-30% over 90 days. That's realistic, it's measurable, and the savings go straight to the bottom line.
The bottom line on maintenance overtime
Overtime isn't free productivity. It's expensive labour that often masks problems you could solve for less. The first step is knowing what it's actually costing and whether the causes are controllable.
If you want to quantify your plant's controllable losses from overtime and other maintenance performance gaps, Ridgway Resilience runs a 10-business-day Plant Profit Leak Assessment using your own data. It puts a dollar figure on the opportunity and delivers a 90-day roadmap. Book a call.