The education sector is under acute financial pressure, and facilities management for universities is feeling the weight of it. In their submission to the Autumn Budget 2025, Universities UK estimated a £1.4 billion shortfall across the sector for 2025-2026. This £1.4 billion figure is Universities UK’s estimate of the net reduction in funding to higher education providers in England during 2025–26 resulting from government policy decisions.
They estimate that the cumulative impact of these ongoing policy decisions will escalate to a £3.7 billion reduction in higher education funding across the UK between the 2024–25 and 2029–30 fiscal windows.
In May 2026, the Office for Students reported that 35.8% of registered higher education providers in England recorded a deficit (where an institution’s spending exceeds its income) in 2024–25, with 42.7% forecast to do so in 2025–26. Universities UK also found that 54% of responding universities had cut back on repairs and maintenance over the previous three years.
The understandable response has been to protect day-to-day operations by holding back on larger spending. The result is a growing list of deferred maintenance that many institutions are only beginning to quantify.
It’s a rational short-term decision, but it rests on a flawed assumption: that university building maintenance works like any other commercial property, where deferred maintenance simply pushes a cost further down a timeline. In reality, university estates behave very differently, and treating them as a generic real estate is precisely how small problems become estate-wide crises.
At SFG20, we work with higher education estates teams across the UK to support maintenance compliance and operational continuity across complex, ageing campuses. Here’s why university estates need to resist conventional FM thinking, and what a more effective approach looks like.
Why University Estates Require More Than a Standard Approach
Conventional office portfolios may offer a greater degree of standardisation in building use, occupancy and installed systems. A university estate can combine teaching buildings, research laboratories, student residences, heritage assets, sports facilities and public spaces, each with different operating requirements, access constraints and risk profiles. Whole-estate comparisons can therefore be misleading unless they account for building use, condition and operational criticality.
In England, university residential accommodation falls within the higher-risk building regime as part of the Building Safety Act 2022 when a building is at least 18 metres high or has at least seven storeys and contains at least two residential units.
Mixed-use buildings may also be in scope where they meet these criteria. A standalone teaching building does not enter the occupied higher-risk building regime solely because of its height, although it remains subject to other applicable building and fire safety requirements. In-scope residential buildings carry additional duties relating to fire and structural safety, Accountable Person responsibilities and the management of the golden thread of building information.
That's a compliance layer that sits on top of everything else the estates team is already managing.
This is why benchmarking a university against an office portfolio, for example, doesn’t work, and why deferred maintenance behaves so differently here.
What Makes University Building Maintenance Different?
It comes down to a handful of pressures that rarely apply to other buildings all at once, and certainly not at this scale.
The Term-Time Calendar Restricts Maintenance Windows
Most buildings can be maintained around their occupants. University estates cannot, because the academic calendar concentrates demand into intense, immovable periods.
During term time, occupancy is relentless. Lecture theatres, labs and libraries run at near-capacity for long hours, and there is almost no tolerance for disruption. The consequences of failure are detrimental too. An outage during exams or a graduation ceremony goes beyond just an inconvenience and can become much more of a reputational crisis.
That pushes major works into a handful of holiday weeks, where every trade is competing for the same narrow window.
Academic timetables can significantly constrain access to teaching spaces. Major intrusive works are therefore often concentrated into lower-occupancy periods, particularly during the summer. However, the available window varies by institution and may be further restricted by research activity, conferences, summer teaching and continued use of student accommodation.
The result is a maintenance programme shaped by both the condition and risk profile of the estate and the periods when access can realistically be secured.
Buildings That Span Centuries
Few estate managers anywhere are asked to maintain a medieval chapel, a Brutalist library and a modern research centre under a single budget line. University estate managers routinely are.
Listed and historic buildings may require consent for works affecting their special character, together with conservation-led methods, compatible materials and specialist expertise. Many post-war buildings now require significant renewal of their fabric, plant and building services. Buildings constructed or refurbished before 2000 may also contain asbestos, which must be actively identified and managed. Newer buildings may offer improved energy performance but can depend on complex controls and specialist systems.
Some plant and equipment maintenance requirements will be common across different building types. However, historic fabric and services may require different inspection methods, materials and specialist interventions, so maintenance regimes should be tailored to the assets and their context.
Research and Specialist Teaching Spaces Drive Hard Compliance Demands
Large parts of the estate aren't just occupied spaces, they are regulated infrastructure that the university’s core work depends on, similar to healthcare facilities.
Some research and teaching spaces are specialist environments on which safety, research continuity and regulatory compliance depend. The materials used in research can also add significant complexity to the fire hazards and require due consideration when undertaking Fire Risk Assessments, and the associated means to mitigate the hazards and the compliance regime that goes with it.
Laboratories may require controlled ventilation, containment, temperature or humidity. Fume cupboards and other local exhaust ventilation systems must be maintained and examined to ensure that they continue to control exposure effectively, while licensed animal facilities are subject to statutory standards. Failure of ventilation, refrigeration or environmental controls can compromise safety, samples and ongoing research.
HVAC failures can create health and safety concerns in any workplace. In specialist research environments, however, the consequences may be particularly severe where ventilation, containment or environmental stability is integral to the activity being undertaken.
Deferral Doesn't Sit Still, It Compounds
There's a final factor worth naming, because it cuts across all the others. In higher education, deferred maintenance doesn’t stay where you leave it. A neglected roof becomes water ingress, which becomes structural and electrical damage, which can force a building to be closed. That can quickly translate to lost revenue. Managing maintenance of this kind, across a portfolio of this scale and age, is fundamentally different from deferring a single repair on a commercial lease.
Our research into university building maintenance investment found over 76,500 outstanding maintenance requests across 61 institutions as of early 2025. this demonstrates the scale of the open maintenance workload across those institutions.
“Deferred maintenance in higher education isn't a facilities problem, it's a strategic liability. When universities cut repair budgets without a risk-based plan, they're not deferring costs, they're accelerating them. The institutions that come through this period in the strongest position will be those that treat planned, preventative maintenance for statutory and operationally critical assets as an essential infrastructure investment, not a discretionary line item.” - Marc Dabbs, SFG20
How Should Facilities Management for Universities Respond to These Challenges?
There's no single answer, but the strongest estate teams tend to follow the same principles.
- Start with an accurate, current asset register supported by condition, criticality and consequence-of-failure data. Where asset register information is incomplete or outdated, investment decisions become less reliable. Bringing this data together enables estates teams to identify statutory and safety-critical requirements and distinguish work that may be safely deferred from work requiring urgent intervention. Protect statutory maintenance requirements first, then prioritise other activity according to safety, operational criticality, condition and consequence of failure.
- Move from reactive to risk-based maintenance planning. Rather than spreading shrinking budgets evenly, concentrate resources where failure carries the highest cost: compliance-critical research spaces, statutory tasks, and the buildings whose loss would most disrupt teaching and safety
- Implement planned preventative maintenance in higher education by building type. A planned preventative maintenance approach, tailored to each building type rather than applied uniformly across the estate, is more likely to cost less over time compared to emergency repairs.
- Use the academic calendar as a planning tool rather than an obstacle. Mapping works to the estate's natural rhythms, and building realistic, properly resourced holiday maintenance programmes rather than over-promising, reduces both cost and the risk of term-time failure.
- Make the financial case in the institution’s own language. Framing deferred maintenance as a quantified, growing liability, with explicit links to research income, student experience and reputational risk lands far better than a generic plea for more funding.
University Building Maintenance Requires a Different Approach
University estates are not ordinary buildings, and the current financial climate makes them more difficult to deal with than usual.
The institutions that successfully make it through this challenging period in good shape will be those that avoid treating their estates like any other and understand their estate’s particular demands, target limited resources by risk, and treat maintenance as the foundation of their objectives.
If you’re responsible for facilities management for universities and want a clearer view of how to manage maintenance compliance and safety under financial pressure, download our guide to university building maintenance compliance. Or take a look at how we have helped other universities improve their compliance, while saving time and money
