What is the Facility Condition Index, and what is a good FCI?

The formula, and the caveat that has to travel with it

Deferred repair cost ÷ current replacement value. A building with $2m of deferred repairs and a $40m replacement value has an FCI of 5%.

The NACUBO/APPA bands — under 5% good, 5–10% fair, over 10% poor — are common in education and public estates, and they are a convention rather than a law. Other sectors band differently. An FCI quoted without its scheme is a number nobody can check, and if you adopt our bands and your own regulator uses different ones, the number will have actively misled you.

What it is actually for

Ranking buildings for capital. Without it, the question “which property most needs the money?” is answered by whoever argues hardest in the room — and the answer will be sincere, and it will be unfalsifiable.

FCI replaces that with an objective comparison, built from priced deficiencies rather than from advocacy. It is not a precise instrument. It does not need to be. It needs to be the same instrument applied to every building.

The trend is the real signal

A single FCI is a snapshot. An FCI climbing while budgets stay flat is the deferred-maintenance spiral, and it is visible years before it becomes a capital emergency.

What that looks like at the end is visible in US higher education, which has the unusual virtue of measuring it: a capital-renewal backlog of $156 per gross square foot, rising 8% a year. That is a higher-education figure, offered as an analog rather than a benchmark. The point is not the number — it is that most estates cannot produce one at all.

Terms

• FCI (Facility Condition Index)