Preventive maintenance compliance, in the sense used inside maintenance departments, means keeping the plan your site set for itself: what share of due planned work was actually done, in the window it was due. It is a useful internal measure and an easy one to make meaningless, because all three of its terms are movable. This page is about that measure. It is not about regulatory compliance, which is a different subject and belongs to your regulator and your own adviser.
Define due, completed and PM once, then leave them alone
Due needs a window, not a date, because nothing is done on the exact day. Completed has to mean the work was done, not that somebody closed the record. And PM has to exclude corrective work, or a breakdown-heavy month looks like a compliant one. Sites that redefine any of the three mid-year lose the ability to compare with their own history, which was the only comparison worth having.
The two ways the figure lies
Closing records at month end without doing the work makes it perfect, which is why the timing reading beside it matters: how close to the due date each visit actually happened. And logging corrective jobs as PM inflates it while planned work is being displaced by breakdowns, which is the exact situation the figure exists to reveal. Both are visible if you look, and neither is visible in the headline number.
What a low figure usually means
Almost never laziness. Usually the plan is larger than the hours available, or the windows are controlled by somebody else, or a share of the intervals are shorter than the equipment needs. All three are addressed by changing the plan rather than by pushing harder against it, and a site that never revises its plan downward is running a schedule it has already decided to ignore.
Questions people ask about preventive maintenance compliance
What is a good PM compliance figure?
Published targets exist and mean little without knowing how a site defines its terms. Your own trend, on stable definitions, is far more informative than any external number.
Does this page cover regulatory compliance?
No, deliberately. What inspections and records regulation requires of your site is a matter for your regulator, your insurer and your own adviser; this site publishes none of it.
Should missed work be carried forward or written off?
Decide once and apply it consistently. Carrying everything forward produces a backlog nobody believes in; writing everything off hides a plan that is too big. Most sites carry forward and revise the plan when the backlog persists.