If you own or manage a building, lift availability is the single number that tells you whether your vertical transport is doing its job. It's also one of the most misunderstood — and the one contractors are happiest to leave vague. Here's what it means, what "good" looks like, and how to hold a contractor to it.
What lift availability actually means
Availability is the proportion of time a lift is in service and available to passengers over a given period. The same idea scales from a single lift over a month to a whole portfolio over a year — only the scope changes. It's the clearest measure of whether the equipment, and the contractor maintaining it, are keeping the lifts running.
What counts as good?
Maintenance agreements commonly specify 98% or higher. That sounds close to perfect — but small percentages hide real downtime. Per lift, across a year:
| Availability | Roughly equals downtime of… |
|---|---|
| 95% | ~18 days a year |
| 98% | ~7 days a year |
| 99% | ~3.5 days a year |
| 99.5% | ~1.8 days a year |
The gap between "98%" and "99%" is about a working week of downtime per lift — which is why the exact target, and how it's measured, matters more than it first appears.
Why the headline number can mislead
- Averages hide outliers. A portfolio at "98%" can still contain one chronically unreliable lift dragging a whole building down.
- Planned vs unplanned. Scheduled downtime for a modernisation is not the same as repeated unplanned breakdowns.
- When it happened. An outage at morning peak in a busy tower matters far more than the same minutes overnight.
What drives availability down
- Slow callout response — the lift is down, but help is hours away.
- Recurring faults left unresolved rather than fixed at the root cause.
- Ageing equipment past its reliable service life.
- Missed or rushed preventive maintenance visits.
How to hold your contractor to it
Good availability isn't luck — it's specified, measured and reviewed:
- Write a target into the agreement — a clear Minimum Service Delivery Threshold, set when you run the tender.
- Measure it independently — don't rely on the contractor's own report of their own performance.
- Review it monthly — per unit, not just portfolio-wide, so a single failing lift can't hide in the average.
Seeing it for real
That's what MAPLE Ascent is built to do — it tracks availability across every unit in your portfolio, to the minute, measured against the threshold written into your contract. "Good availability" stops being a claim in a report and becomes something you can see, compare and act on.