What a maintenance coordinator really costs

At some point every growing rental business asks the same question: should we hire someone to run maintenance? The job listing is easy to write. Answer tenants, send vendors, keep work orders moving, update property owners. The harder part is knowing what the hire really costs and what it still leaves uncovered.

Here is the math with public numbers, each with its date, so you can swap in your own.

The salary

The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not publish a separate category for maintenance coordinators. Two of its occupations come close, and together they give a fair range:

• Secretaries and administrative assistants (except legal, medical and executive) had a median annual wage of $47,540 in May 2025. It is the closest match for the answering and scheduling half of the job.
• Production, planning and expediting clerks had a median of $59,650 in May 2025. BLS describes them as coordinating and expediting the flow of work and materials, which is close to the coordinating half of the job.

A median means half earn less and half earn more. Pay in your city can be well above or below either number, so check local listings before you budget.

Add benefits and payroll costs

Salary is not the whole cost of an employee. The BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release for June 2026 puts private-industry office and administrative support jobs at $25.22 an hour in wages and $11.51 in benefits. Benefits there include paid leave, insurance, retirement and legally required costs like Social Security and unemployment insurance. That works out to about 46 cents in benefits for every dollar of wages. Those figures cover the whole office and administrative support group, so we apply the group ratio to both medians.

The costs that do not show up on the offer letter

• Hiring. Job posts, interviews and the weeks the role sits empty while maintenance falls back on you.
• Training. A new coordinator needs time to learn your properties, your vendors, your owners and your software before they work alone.
• Tools. A seat in your property management software, a phone line, a computer and a desk if you have an office.
• Your time. Someone answers their questions and reviews their decisions, at least at first.
• Turnover. When a coordinator leaves, the vendor relationships and the know-how about each property often leave with them, and you start over.

The hours one person can cover

A year has 8,760 hours. A full-time employee is paid for about 2,080 of them, which is about 24 percent of the week. Vacation, holidays and sick days come out of that. Tenants report problems on nights and weekends too, including the emergencies that cannot wait for Monday.

So a coordinator usually comes with a second plan for their off hours: you carry the phone, the team rotates, or an answering service takes the calls. If the coordinator takes after-hours calls, check how that time is paid. Under federal law, time spent handling calls is work, and on-call time can be too when the limits on it are tight. State rules can be stricter.

When a hire starts to make sense

How many requests you get, and how long each takes from first call to closed work order, decides it more than door count does. Count every follow-up. You can work this out from your own records in an afternoon:

1. Pull the last 12 months of work orders from your software and divide by 12 to get requests per month.
2. For one normal week, time every call, text and email on a handful of requests from start to close. Average it to get minutes per request.
3. Multiply requests per month by minutes per request and divide by 60. That is the hours of coordinating work per month.
4. Compare it with what one person can give. A full-time employee is paid for about 173 hours a month, and real working time is lower after meetings and time off.

If the hours of coordinating work are a small slice of that, a full-time hire will be underused and expensive. If they are close to a full month, a hire may be right, and you still need a plan for nights and weekends. If they are well past it, you may need a second person, or a way to take the chasing off the person you have.

Who pays for it

Some management agreements charge property owners a coordination fee or a markup on repairs. Others fold maintenance into the management fee. Before you budget a hire, read what your agreements say and whether the cost can be shared fairly. Changing what owners pay usually needs notice under the agreement. The post on maintenance markups and coordination fees shows how to write each model into the agreement.

Other ways to get the coverage

• A part-time coordinator for business hours, with you or a rotation on nights.
• An answering service for nights and weekends, with your daytime team doing the follow-up. We compare the options in covering after-hours maintenance calls, and the plans in what an answering service costs.
• A service that does the coordinating, answering tenants, chasing vendors and booking visits at any hour, alongside a coordinator or instead of one.

That last one is what we build. With now ours the price is $5 a door a month with calls, texts and minutes included, so 100 doors is $500 a month and 300 doors is $1,500. On the same arithmetic, it costs what one coordinator in the table above costs at roughly 1,150 to 1,450 doors. You may want both: a coordinator who keeps the relationships and the decisions, and now ours covering the nights, weekends and chasing they cannot. See the side-by-side on now ours vs hiring a maintenance coordinator.