# An Empty Maintenance Seat Costs More Than Its Salary

> One hour of unplanned downtime can cost a plant more than a technician earns in a year. Here’s how manufacturers can build a maintenance bench.

- Canonical: https://praxagency.com/blog/manufacturing-maintenance-technician-shortage
- Author: Prax Agency
- Published: 2026-11-04
- Updated: 2026-11-04
- Topic: Hiring

## The short version

- Siemens’ downtime research puts unplanned downtime at 11% of revenue for the world’s 500 biggest companies, and up to $150,000 an hour at the top end for smaller manufacturers. The BLS median pay for a maintenance technician is $64,100 a year.
- BLS projects 14% growth for industrial machinery mechanics, machinery maintenance workers, and millwrights through 2035, with about 51,900 openings a year. Growth is concentrated in mechanics at 18%.
- Reshoring adds demand, but the 247,000 jobs announced in 2025 are announcements, not hires. The plants that staff their maintenance bench first will start up faster.

The line stops at 2:10 in the morning. A bearing on a conveyor drive has seized. The part is in the crib, but nobody on shift is certified to swap it, and the one person who is lives two hours away.

By sunrise, the question isn’t whether the open maintenance job was worth $64,100. It’s what the plant just lost while it sat empty.

Hiring plans treat maintenance as overhead, a cost to trim and a seat that can wait. Production sees it differently, because production is the one that pays when the seat is empty.

## What does an empty maintenance seat actually cost?

The most-cited research on this is Siemens’ [The True Cost of Downtime 2024](https://assets.new.siemens.com/siemens/assets/api/uuid:1b43afb5-2d07-47f7-9eb7-893fe7d0bc59/TCOD-2024_original.pdf). It estimates that the world’s 500 biggest companies lose almost $1.4 trillion a year to unplanned downtime, equal to 11% of their revenues.

| Figure | What it measures |
| --- | --- |
| 11% | of revenue lost to unplanned downtime at the world’s 500 biggest companies |
| $2.3M | per hour of unplanned downtime in a large automotive plant |
| $253M | a year for the average large plant in the sectors Siemens surveyed |

Source: [Siemens, The True Cost of Downtime 2024](https://assets.new.siemens.com/siemens/assets/api/uuid:1b43afb5-2d07-47f7-9eb7-893fe7d0bc59/TCOD-2024_original.pdf)

Those are big-plant numbers, and the report is candid about its base. The results come from [181 completed online interviews](https://assets.new.siemens.com/siemens/assets/api/uuid:1b43afb5-2d07-47f7-9eb7-893fe7d0bc59/TCOD-2024_original.pdf) with maintenance, engineering, and IT professionals at large industrial organizations, covering April 2019 to March 2023. It’s a survey estimate, not audited accounts, and it was published by a company that sells predictive maintenance software.

Siemens does address smaller producers: [downtime costs can reach $150,000 an hour at the top end](https://assets.new.siemens.com/siemens/assets/api/uuid:1b43afb5-2d07-47f7-9eb7-893fe7d0bc59/TCOD-2024_original.pdf) for small and medium-sized manufacturers. Set that beside [the BLS median wage of $64,100](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/installation-maintenance-and-repair/industrial-machinery-mechanics-and-maintenance-workers-and-millwrights.htm) for this occupation group. By simple arithmetic, a single top-end hour costs more than twice a technician’s annual pay. Your plant won’t sit at the top end, so replace that number with your own.

The report also lists what the bill contains: lost revenue, wages for staff who can’t work, salaries of those fixing the problem, emergency replacement parts, and contractual penalties. Most of those are invisible on a job requisition.

> Every vacancy looks cheap on the payroll report and expensive on the floor.

## Is there a shortage of maintenance technicians?

Not with a clean national count, and it’s worth saying so. There’s no single published figure for unfilled maintenance jobs. What exists is the broader picture, and it points one way.

The [Deloitte and Manufacturing Institute study](https://themanufacturinginstitute.org/manufacturers-need-as-many-as-3-8-million-new-employees-by-2033/) projects that as many as 3.8 million additional manufacturing employees could be needed between 2024 and 2033, and that 1.9 million of those jobs could go unfilled if skills and applicant gaps aren’t addressed. That’s a projection, and the authors tie it to conditions. In the same release, 65% of respondents said attracting and retaining talent is their primary business challenge.

The [BLS count of openings](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTS3000JOL) shows the demand is live. There were 584,000 manufacturing job openings in September 2026, seasonally adjusted, up from 530,000 in August. One month is noisy, so watch the trend rather than the jump.

On maintenance specifically, the BLS outlook for [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) is unusually strong. These workers held about 547,300 jobs in 2025. BLS projects 14% growth through 2035 and about 51,900 openings a year, as new workers enter and existing ones retire or change careers.

**Projected job growth, 2025 to 2035**

BLS projections. Maintenance workers, machinery are projected to decline 2%, so the group average hides a split.

| Measure | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Industrial machinery mechanics | 18% |
| All three occupations combined | 14% |
| Millwrights | 1% |

Source: [U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/installation-maintenance-and-repair/industrial-machinery-mechanics-and-maintenance-workers-and-millwrights.htm)

That split matters when you write the job. Mechanics, the 446,900 workers who diagnose and repair, are where demand is growing. Millwrights, at 40,700 workers, are a small and nearly flat group, which makes each one harder to replace.

## Do reshoring and new plants make it worse?

They add demand, with a caveat. The Reshoring Initiative reported that manufacturers and foreign direct investors [announced 247,000 manufacturing jobs in 2025](https://www.manufacturingdive.com/news/reshoring-foreign-direct-investment-247k-jobs-2025-report-reshoring-initiative/873070/), essentially matching 2024. Those are announced jobs, not confirmed hires, and announcements can slip or shrink.

But a new line behaves differently from an old one. It has to be commissioned, and then maintained for decades. A plant can recruit operators in waves. It can’t easily recruit the person who knows how a new line fails in the first year, because that person has to be built, usually from inside.

There’s also a quieter pressure. [Manufacturing Dive reported](https://www.manufacturingdive.com/news/manufacturing-labor-shortage-2033-deloitte-mi-report-2024/713133/) that the Deloitte study counted 270,000 industrial machinery maintenance technicians in manufacturing in 2022, and projected 16% growth by 2032. These are the same people every new plant, and every existing one, will try to hire.

## Does a thin bench really show up as downtime?

Maintenance leaders say it does, with a vendor-survey caveat. In MaintainX’s [The State of Industrial Maintenance 2026](https://getmaintainx.com/state-of-industrial-maintenance-report), which surveyed 2,234 maintenance and operations leaders in the U.S. and Canada, 34% reported more unplanned downtime in the last 12 months, and 36% pointed to labor shortages as a reason for increased downtime. MaintainX sells maintenance software, and the page doesn’t name an independent research partner, so treat it as direction, not proof.

Direction is enough to act on. The cost side is documented, and the supply side is tightening.

## How can employers build a maintenance bench?

Most plants try to buy experience on the open market, and the market is thin. The more reliable route is to grow it. Here’s a practical order of operations.

1. **Price your own downtime first.** Take your hourly cost of a stopped line, including lost output, idle labor, expedited parts, and penalties. Multiply by the hours lost last year to failures that waited for the right person. That number is your ceiling for what a maintenance hire is worth, and it makes the budget conversation shorter.
2. **Map who can fix what.** Build a simple matrix of your critical machines against the people qualified to work on them. Any machine with one name beside it is a single point of failure. Those are your first training targets.
3. **Cross-train inside the plant.** Operators who already know a machine’s sounds and habits can learn to handle first-line fixes, which frees technicians for harder work. Put it in writing, with sign-offs, so skills stay with the plant when a person leaves.
4. **Start a registered apprenticeship.** BLS notes that mechanics and maintenance workers typically receive [more than a year of on-the-job training](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/installation-maintenance-and-repair/industrial-machinery-mechanics-and-maintenance-workers-and-millwrights.htm), and that most millwrights complete an apprenticeship lasting about 4 years. A structured program makes that training deliberate rather than accidental. Finishing is the hard part, so it helps to know [what the federal data says about who completes](https://praxagency.com/blog/apprenticeship-completion-rates).
5. **Hire for aptitude, then teach the equipment.** BLS lists a high school diploma as the typical entry requirement. Mechanical reasoning, troubleshooting habits, and reliability are easier to screen for than a decade of experience on your exact line.
6. **Pair every veteran with a successor.** Give the retiring millwright a named successor and time to teach. Record the fixes nobody wrote down.
7. **Retain the people you train.** The Department of Labor’s apprenticeship site reports [93% employment retention](https://apprenticeship.gov/) among apprentices after completion, based on data it attributes to state and federal reporting systems. That’s across all trades, so it’s a benchmark, not a promise. In the Deloitte release, flexible work arrangements were [cited as the most impactful retention strategy](https://themanufacturinginstitute.org/manufacturers-need-as-many-as-3-8-million-new-employees-by-2033/), which may be harder to offer on a shift schedule, so pay, overtime predictability, and a visible path up are where maintenance employers have room to compete. For the new hire’s side of those first months, see [our piece on the first 90 days](https://praxagency.com/blog/construction-new-hire-turnover-first-90-days).

None of this is exotic. The difficulty is that it asks for spending before the failure instead of after.

## What the numbers don’t tell you

A few honest limits. The Siemens figures come from a survey of large manufacturers and shouldn’t be applied to a 60-person shop without adjustment. The BLS projections are estimates, and they cover three occupations that move in different directions. The reshoring figure counts announcements. The maintenance-specific survey data comes from a software vendor. And the facilities side, building engineers and plant maintenance outside manufacturing, shares the same occupational pool but isn’t measured separately here.

What isn’t in doubt is the arithmetic of the trade. Technician pay is a line item you can see. Downtime is a loss spread across the P&L, so it’s easy to leave out of the decision.

So when the next requisition for a maintenance technician lands on your desk, ask what the line costs for an hour. Then ask how many hours the seat can stay empty.

If that seat is empty now, [tell us about the line it keeps running](https://praxagency.com/hire).

## Common questions

### How much does unplanned downtime cost a manufacturer?

Siemens estimates it at about 11% of revenue for the world’s 500 biggest companies, roughly $1.4 trillion a year. For smaller manufacturers, it reports downtime costs can reach $150,000 an hour at the top end. The survey covered mostly large plants, so use your own hourly figure. Source: [Siemens, The True Cost of Downtime 2024](https://assets.new.siemens.com/siemens/assets/api/uuid:1b43afb5-2d07-47f7-9eb7-893fe7d0bc59/TCOD-2024_original.pdf).

### How much do industrial maintenance technicians earn?

The BLS median annual wage for industrial machinery mechanics, machinery maintenance workers, and millwrights was $64,100 in May 2025. The typical entry requirement is a high school diploma, with more than a year of on-the-job training for mechanics and maintenance workers. Source: [U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/installation-maintenance-and-repair/industrial-machinery-mechanics-and-maintenance-workers-and-millwrights.htm).

### How many manufacturing jobs could go unfilled by 2033?

Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute project that as many as 3.8 million additional manufacturing employees could be needed between 2024 and 2033, and that 1.9 million of those jobs could go unfilled if skills and applicant gaps are not addressed. It is a projection, not a count. Source: [The Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte](https://themanufacturinginstitute.org/manufacturers-need-as-many-as-3-8-million-new-employees-by-2033/).

### Do registered apprenticeships help retain maintenance workers?

The Department of Labor’s apprenticeship site reports that 93% of apprentices retain employment after completing their program. That figure covers all occupations, not maintenance alone, and the site attributes it to state and federal reporting systems, so treat it as a benchmark. Source: [U.S. Department of Labor, Apprenticeship.gov](https://apprenticeship.gov/).

## Sources

1. [The True Cost of Downtime 2024](https://assets.new.siemens.com/siemens/assets/api/uuid:1b43afb5-2d07-47f7-9eb7-893fe7d0bc59/TCOD-2024_original.pdf), Siemens (Senseye Predictive Maintenance), 2024.
2. [Industrial Machinery Mechanics, Machinery Maintenance Workers, and Millwrights, Occupational Outlook Handbook](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/installation-maintenance-and-repair/industrial-machinery-mechanics-and-maintenance-workers-and-millwrights.htm), U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, accessed November 2026.
3. [Manufacturers Need as Many as 3.8 Million New Employees by 2033](https://themanufacturinginstitute.org/manufacturers-need-as-many-as-3-8-million-new-employees-by-2033/), The Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte, April 3, 2024.
4. [Job Openings: Manufacturing (JTS3000JOL)](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTS3000JOL), U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, via FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, November 3, 2026.
5. [Reshoring and foreign direct investment accounted for 247,000 manufacturing jobs in 2025](https://www.manufacturingdive.com/news/reshoring-foreign-direct-investment-247k-jobs-2025-report-reshoring-initiative/873070/), Manufacturing Dive, reporting the Reshoring Initiative report, October 29, 2026.
6. [Manufacturing labor shortage could reach 1.9 million by 2033, Deloitte and MI report finds](https://www.manufacturingdive.com/news/manufacturing-labor-shortage-2033-deloitte-mi-report-2024/713133/), Manufacturing Dive, April 16, 2024.
7. [The State of Industrial Maintenance 2026](https://getmaintainx.com/state-of-industrial-maintenance-report), MaintainX, 2026.
8. [Apprenticeship.gov](https://apprenticeship.gov/), U.S. Department of Labor, accessed November 2026.

This article is general information, not legal, financial, or employment advice. Statistics are as published by their sources on the dates shown.