The Average Cost of Home Maintenance Is Up, Now $10,000 a Year. How Do You Compare?

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Owning a home can be a great experience, but it's also often an expensive one. Unlike with renting, if something goes wrong, you can't just ring the landlord -- you have to actually deal with the problem yourself.

This might mean you have to spend a lot of long nights learning how to do it yourself, or it might mean getting a list of local professionals and figuring out how to tell them what you need, while still saying within your budget .

Thumbtack, a home services directory, recently released its Q2 2024 numbers on just what it costs to maintain a home. For this quarter, annual home maintenance reached an average of $10,147 for single family homes in the United States, which is a 4.68% increase year over year.

Top findings from the Thumbtack report

Thumbtack says that the cost of everything is rising. But if you've been considering selling your home and getting another, it's important to understand what your costs may be beyond your mortgage rate and monthly payment amount. Findings like these help homeowners and buyers stay informed.

In Q2 2024, 14 of the 19 categories Thumbtack tracks had risen compared to Q2 2023, with heating system repair and maintenance making the largest jump of over 41%, the cost of pest control rising over 12% and the cost of gutter cleaning and maintenance also up 12%.

Some of the biggest ticket items overall were pretty unsurprising, though. Roof repair or maintenance was the most expensive, followed by tree trimming and removal, deck staining and sealing, and water heater repair or maintenance. Remember, these numbers come from the app's actual users, so prices may vary.

How you can save money on your home's care

A $10,000 yearly budget for home repairs is pretty steep, even for an older home like the one I own. I'm luckily in a low cost of living area, so I don't spend anything near that on mine (fingers crossed). But I was also a Realtor for a decade, so I've learned a few tricks for saving money on this sort of thing.

Here are a few things that literally every homeowner can do to help prevent costly home maintenance bills into the future.

1. Have a regular home and termite inspection

Often the same person who does your home inspection can do a termite inspection while they're at it, and why not? Having your home inspected when you buy it is a given, and it's a great idea to do before selling, but you can also do a home inspection any time you feel like it. House making a funny noise? Home inspection time.

You can generally expect to pay somewhere around $300 to $500 for a home inspection. You definitely don't need one yearly, but having one every five to 10 years is a good idea, just in case there is something lurking in your crawlspace, attic, or you're just missing big problems.

Finding problems sooner, rather than later, can make them cheaper to fix. Small problems are easy to prevent from turning into big problems, and doing the work will ultimately save a lot of money and headaches down the road.

2. Weatherproof your home

Weatherproofing often comes up when we're talking about the changing of the seasons, so your furnace or air conditioner has the best chance of success, but that's not all weatherproofing is good for. High quality caulk seals around the outside of your windows, as an example, prevent water penetration into your walls. For $12 worth of caulk and an afternoon, you could save hundreds or thousands of dollars in damage.

The same goes for repairing door sweeps and gaskets around doors. A well-maintained sweep keeps pests and water out, protecting your home, your floors, and your sanity. It's money well spent, especially when you consider that weatherproofing is generally so simple that any homeowner can do it.

3. Clean the gutters

Wait, cleaning the gutters can save money on home maintenance? Yep. It sure can. And like weatherproofing, just about anybody can clean their own gutters with a bucket, a ladder, and a hand trowel.

When gutters are too full, they tend to back up, and all that water has to go somewhere. Guess where it goes. If you guessed "behind your gutter," well, you win a prize. It's a prize called awareness, and I bestow it to you freely.

The problem with "behind your gutter" is that what's behind your gutter is generally the attic or an access to the wall's interior. Either way, water can come into your wall, pour over your electrical, your insulation, rot out your windows, and so forth. It's the gift that keeps on giving.

So clean your gutters at least once a year, or when you notice the flow has slowed, and if you're feeling squirrely, add some gutter guards to them to help reduce how often you have to clean (you still need to check them twice a year, though).

Owning a home is expensive, but prevention can make it cheaper

Nobody ever said owning a home was cheap, but you might not have expected to need to spend upward of $800 or more each month to take care of your home. This, of course, will depend on the size of your home, where your home is located, and how much you can truly do yourself.

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