Elevator Maintenance Checklist
An elevator maintenance checklist template for a passenger lift, built in the order the faults actually arrive. Section 2 comes first for a reason: nearly all callouts and most injuries are doors, which is the opposite of how a lift is usually imagined and the opposite of how most checklists are weighted.
- Forty-eight checks, and the doors come first rather than the machine room
- The brake gap measured and written down, not confirmed as working
- The thorough examination tracked as its own row, with its own due date
- A Service History tab that trends brake gap and door share across visits
Elevator Maintenance Checklist
One lift, one visit
| # | Door and entrance check | Done | Reading | Expected |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Door reversal device tested with an obstruction at low and high level | |||
| 2 | Brake operation, lining wear and gap measured | |||
| 3 | Pit clean, dry, no water ingress, sump pump operating |
The document you will get. Download for the full, editable file.
Who this elevator maintenance checklist is for
Four people read this document, and three of them are looking for something the fourth did not think to write down.
The lift engineer on site
Section 2 first, and the brake gap recorded as a number in section 3. The reading is worth more than the tick beside it, because the next engineer can only see a trend if you left one.
Facilities or estates, as the duty holder
Your exposure is section 6. A service contract and a thorough examination are not the same obligation, and the row that gets missed is the one the building assumes is covered because somebody in overalls turns up every month.
Whoever answers the phone at three in the morning
Section 5 is yours. It tests the alarm all the way to a person answering rather than to a bell ringing, because an alarm reaching an unmonitored line is a passenger shut in a box with nobody coming.
The contract manager reviewing the provider
The Service History tab is the argument. Callout counts, door share and brake gap across a year say more about how a lift is being maintained than any single visit sheet, and they are the numbers a renewal conversation turns on.
Which section matters the most in your sector
The lift is largely the same machine everywhere. What changes is who is in the car, how long they will wait, and what it costs the building when the doors are the thing that fails.
- FM service providers
Section 6. Where lifts are subcontracted across a portfolio, the thorough examination is the obligation that falls between the managing agent and the service provider, and the only document that settles it is the one with both dates on it.
FM service provider software - Healthcare
Section 5. A hospital lift is a bed lift, so an entrapment is a patient transfer stopped between floors, and the response time written in the contract has to be one somebody has actually tested.
Healthcare maintenance software - Retail and malls
Section 2. Door timing is a trading decision as much as a safety one, because a lift adjusted for throughput on a busy floor is a lift closing on people carrying bags and pushing strollers.
Retail maintenance software - Commercial real estate
Levelling and ride quality in section 4. In a let office building the lift is the first thing a tenant touches each morning, and a judder or a 20 mm step at the lobby does more reputational damage than a week of late work orders.
Portfolio maintenance software - Education
Section 5 again, for a different reason. Campus buildings run quiet in the evening and empty in vacation, so the alarm has to reach somebody off site rather than a reception desk that closed at six.
Campus maintenance software - Corporate facilities
Section 3. A single bank of lifts carries the whole building twice a day, so brake and rope condition is a capacity question, and the measurement that shows wear early is what keeps a unit out of an unplanned shutdown.
Corporate facilities software
What an elevator maintenance checklist should contain
An elevator maintenance checklist is the record of a single service visit to one lift. It covers the doors, the machine and drive, the car, shaft and pit, and the emergency arrangements, records measured readings rather than ticks alone, and tracks the statutory thorough examination separately from the service itself.
A. Fields specific to an elevator maintenance checklist
| Field | What goes in it | Why it earns its place |
|---|---|---|
| Maintenance contract, provider and level | Comprehensive, semi-comprehensive or basic, and what it excludes | The exclusions are the useful half. A basic contract covering lubrication and adjustment leaves ropes, the controller and the examination somewhere else, and nobody discovers which until something fails and the invoice arrives. |
| Last thorough examination, and by whom | A date and a name, written apart from the service date | Two fields that look redundant and are not. They exist because a building that sees a lift engineer monthly will assume the examination is covered by the same visit, and it is normally a separate appointment by a separate competent person. |
| Outstanding items from the last examination | What the examiner raised and nobody has closed | The most commonly empty field on any lift document. An examination report that generated actions nobody owns is the usual reason a lift fails the next one for exactly the same thing. |
| Door reversal device, tested low and high | An obstruction at both levels, not just at waist height | Written as two heights because that is how it fails. A light curtain blinded by dirt at the bottom of the opening still stops a hand at chest height, so the test everyone does is the test that passes. |
| Closing force and speed | A measured value against the limit, not an impression | Door force is the parameter most often adjusted to fix a complaint about slow service, and it is adjusted away from the people who need the extra second. A number lets the next engineer see it moved. |
| Brake lining wear and gap | Millimeters, recorded every visit | The single most useful number on the sheet. Wear is slow and silent, the brake holds until it does not, and a figure that has grown across three visits is the only form of warning the component gives. |
| Rope or belt condition | Wear, broken strands and tension across the set | Tension across a set of ropes matters more than any single rope, because an unequal set loads one rope and wears the sheave grooves unevenly, and both of those are cheaper to find early. |
| Pit condition and water | Clean, dry, sump operating, checked every visit | The one check most likely to be skipped and most likely to fail the examination. Water sits under the car corroding buffers and safety gear where nobody looks until an examiner puts a light down there. |
| Emergency line answered by a monitored center | Two-way speech confirmed, with a response from a person | A tested alarm and an answered alarm are different events. This field exists because the common failure is not a dead battery, it is a working autodialer calling a number that rings in an empty room. |
| Entrapment response time | Agreed, written down, and realistic for this site | An hour is a very long time inside a stalled car. Writing the agreed figure next to who actually attends is what turns a contract clause into something the building can plan around. |
| Statutory and contractual obligations | A table with frequency, last done, next due and days to go | This is where the examination stops being assumed. Days to go against each obligation is the column that gets read, because Due and Overdue mean nothing without a number beside them. |
| Door share of callouts | Door related callouts as a share of all callouts | The counter-intuitive one. A low figure almost never means well adjusted doors, it means callouts are not being logged, and that is a worse problem than the doors because it hides everything else as well. |
If you cut this down, keep the brake gap and the examination dates. Everything else on the sheet describes the state of the lift on the day somebody looked at it, and most of it will be the same next quarter. Those two are different. The brake gap is the one measurement that turns a sequence of visits into a trend, which matters because the component it describes degrades invisibly and then stops working all at once, so a tick confirming the brake held tells you only that you have not reached the end yet. The examination dates are the ones that decide whether the lift is legal to run, and they are the pair most often assumed rather than checked, because a building that sees a lift engineer every month has every reason to believe somebody competent has already looked. A sheet that is thorough about ride quality and vague about those two has been written to describe a visit rather than to manage a lift.
B. What it looks like filled in
Five visits to one lift, taken from the Service History tab rather than from any single service sheet.
| Visit | Brake gap | Callouts | Door related | Door share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jun 2027 | 0.8 mm | 6 | 4 | 67% |
| Sep 2027 | 0.9 mm | 5 | 4 | 80% |
| Dec 2027 | 1.1 mm | 8 | 6 | 75% |
| Mar 2028 | 1.3 mm | 7 | 2 | 29% |
| Jun 2028 | 1.6 mm | 9 | 7 | 78% |
The brake gap doubled over five visits and nobody raised it once, because every individual visit recorded a brake that worked. Read down that column and the lift is telling you when it needs attention; read any single row and it is silent. The other thing worth reading twice is March, where door related callouts drop to 29 percent and the lift looks like it has improved. Nothing about the lift changed that quarter. A relief engineer logged callouts by what he replaced rather than by what the passenger reported, and the figure that looked like progress was a reporting change. That is why a low door share is treated as a question about the log rather than as a result.
Word to adapt the checks to your own contract and your own lift types, Excel for the readings, the obligations table with days to go and the Service History tab that trends brake gap and door share, PDF for the copy the engineer carries. Free, and yours to rebrand.
How do you run an elevator maintenance visit?
One lift, one visit. Work it in the order below rather than the order of the machine, because the order below is the order the faults arrive in. Six steps.
Establish what the contract actually covers, and when the lift was last examined
Building, lift reference and group, type, manufacturer and year, rated load, speed and floors served, and the controller age. Then the two fields that decide everything else: the contract level with its exclusions written out, and the date of the last thorough examination with the name of whoever carried it out and anything they raised that is still open.
Work the doors first, and test the reversal device at two heights
Twelve checks. Landing doors closing and locking at every floor, car doors through full travel, interlocks proved at every landing, no landing door openable without the car present, gibs engaging the sill groove, sills and tracks clear, the operator and its linkages adjusted, closing force and speed measured against the limit, and the reversal device tested with an obstruction low as well as high, because the low test is the one that finds a blinded light curtain.
Go to the machine and record readings, not impressions
Twelve checks covering the machine room condition and temperature, the motor, gearbox and bearings for noise, heat and vibration, oil levels and leaks, sheave and groove wear, rope or belt wear, broken strands and equal tension, terminations and anchorages, the governor and overspeed device with its seal intact, the controller and its contactors, and the hydraulic pump, valves and ram where fitted. The brake gets a measured gap and a hold test at rated load.
Ride the car, then look at the places passengers never see
Twelve checks. Car interior, lighting, ventilation, indicators and announcements, levelling accuracy at every floor and ride quality through the travel, guide shoes and rail lubrication, safety gear and linkage free, travelling cable clear. Then the shaft and the pit: clean, lit, nothing stored, and the pit specifically dry with the sump operating, because standing water is corroding the buffers and safety gear underneath the car.
Test the emergency arrangements all the way to a person
Twelve checks. The alarm has to sound somewhere a human being will respond, the telephone or intercom has to carry two-way speech, and the call has to be answered by a monitored center that confirms it. Then the autodialer battery, the car emergency lighting and its duration, the manual release procedure available at the machine, release instructions displayed and current, trained staff or a known route to the contractor, and the agreed entrapment response time.
Close the visit on the obligations, not on the checks
Grade every defect Critical, Major or Minor, and stop the lift for anything touching door interlocks, the brake, the governor or the safety gear. Then fill the result block: completion, the brake gap, callouts since the last visit and how many were doors, entrapments, and examination items still open. Sign off with the lift status, the next service date and, separately, the next thorough examination date.
The service visit versus the thorough examination
These two get conflated more often than any other pair in building services, and the conflation is expensive. They are different activities, usually by different people, for different reasons.
| Aspect | The maintenance visit | The thorough examination |
|---|---|---|
| What it is for | Keeping the lift running and adjusted | Confirming it is safe to continue in service |
| Who does it | The service provider under contract | A competent person, usually independent of them |
| Who it answers to | The building and the contract | The insurer, and the statutory regime |
| What it produces | A service sheet and a list of adjustments | A report, with defects and timescales attached |
| What happens to findings | The engineer fixes them on the visit | They become actions somebody else has to close |
| How it is usually missed | It is not. Somebody attends every month | By assuming the monthly visit already covered it |
The failure is almost never that a building refuses to have its lifts examined. It is that the building believes it already has. A lift engineer attends regularly, leaves paperwork, and that paperwork looks exactly like the evidence of a regime being followed. Nothing on a service sheet says the examination is missing, because the examination is not the service provider’s job to raise. The two documents answer to different people: one to a contract about availability, the other to an insurer about whether the lift should be carrying passengers at all. They also fail differently. A missed service shows up as a lift that gets worse, which is uncomfortable and visible. A missed examination shows up as nothing at all, right up until an incident or a renewal, at which point the building discovers it has been running passenger equipment outside its statutory regime for a period measured in years. That is why section 6 puts both on the same table with days to go against each, and why the examiner’s open items get a field of their own rather than living in the report they came from.
When the template starts to feel limiting
One lift on one visit is well served by a sheet. A bank of lifts across a portfolio, over years, is where it stops, and it stops in the same four places.
The examination date lives in somebody’s head
Days to go is a column that is only correct on the day it was typed. A folder of service sheets has no way to tell anybody that an examination fell due last month, and nothing escalates when it does.
Readings do not become a trend
The brake gap is written on a sheet that goes in a file. Seeing that it has grown from 0.8 to 1.6 means finding five sheets and reading one cell from each, which is work nobody does until there is a reason to.
The lift is not a record anywhere
LIFT-01 at Northgate House exists as a description typed at the top of a page. What was replaced last year, what the examiner raised, how often it traps people and which faults keep returning is scattered across documents rather than held against the machine.
You cannot compare one provider against another
Judging whether a contract is being honored means reading a year of sheets per lift. Callouts per lift, door share, repeat faults and how many examination items are still open are exactly the numbers a renewal needs and the ones paper cannot produce.
What running this in Facilio looks like
The template is the paper version of this visit. The checks do not change; what changes is that the lift becomes a record with a history, the readings land against it instead of on a sheet, the thorough examination becomes a dated obligation with an owner, and the Service History stops being something you reconstruct from a folder.
Ops Performance Intelligence
The examination has a due date that chases itself
The statutory examination stops depending on somebody reading a days column on the day it mattered. It becomes an obligation against the lift with its own frequency and owner, so it surfaces before it lapses rather than at the point an insurer asks for it.
Reactive Maintenance Agent
A widening brake gap is a condition, not a cell
Readings taken on the visit are held against the machine rather than the sheet, so a measurement moving in one direction across visits becomes a flagged condition on the lift instead of a number nobody put side by side.
Work Completion Validator
Examiner items cannot quietly stay open
Findings from a thorough examination become actions with owners and dates rather than lines in a report, so a lift cannot show as compliant while items raised at its last examination have never been closed.
Asset Intelligence
The lift carries its own history
Every visit, callout, entrapment and part lands against LIFT-01 rather than against a building name typed into a form, so the question of whether this unit is getting worse has an answer that does not require opening a filing cabinet.
Hallucination-free by design. Atom AI answers from the records in your tenant rather than generating plausible text, so an empty field reads as empty rather than filled in for you.
Frequently asked questions
What should an elevator maintenance checklist include?
Lift and contract details, then four groups of checks: the doors and entrances, the machine room and drive, the car, shaft and pit, and the entrapment and emergency arrangements. After those, a table of statutory and contractual obligations, a graded defects list and a result block with the readings that matter.
The ordering is deliberate. Doors account for nearly all callouts and most injuries, so they come first rather than after the machine room, which is where a checklist written around how a lift is imagined would start.
How often should an elevator be serviced?
Frequency is set by the contract, the equipment and the traffic it carries, and monthly or quarterly are both common for a passenger lift in regular use. The template does not assume an interval; it records the date of this visit and the date the next one is due.
The more useful question is usually whether the interval is being honored and what it is producing. A lift on a monthly contract generating rising callouts between visits is telling you something that the frequency itself does not.
What is the difference between a service visit and a thorough examination?
A service visit keeps the lift running and adjusted, and is carried out by the provider under contract. A thorough examination is a separate assessment by a competent person of whether the lift is safe to remain in service, and it answers to the insurer and the statutory regime rather than to the contract.
They are usually separate appointments by separate parties, and the examination is routinely excluded from the service contract. The reason the template gives both their own fields and puts them on the same obligations table is that buildings very commonly assume the monthly visit covers both.
Why do the doors come first?
Because that is where the failures are. Nearly all callouts and most injuries involve the doors rather than anything to do with the car moving when it should not, so a checklist weighted toward the machine room is weighted toward the fear instead of toward the fault.
It is also where the quiet failures live. A light curtain blinded by dirt low in the opening still stops a hand at chest height, which is exactly the height at which the device normally gets tested, so the usual test passes on a device that will not stop a foot or a walking stick.
Why measure the brake gap instead of testing the brake?
Because lining wear is gradual and the brake holds right up until the point it does not. A test confirms the brake worked on the day, which will be true on every visit until one where it is not, so the test cannot give you warning.
A measured gap can. Recorded every visit it becomes a trend, and a figure that has grown steadily over a year is the component asking for attention while there is still time to schedule it rather than react to it.
What does it mean if very few callouts are door related?
Usually that callouts are not being logged properly, rather than that the doors are unusually well adjusted. Door faults dominate lift callouts almost everywhere, so a low share is a question about the log before it is a conclusion about the lift.
It is worth chasing because a log that is not capturing door faults is probably not capturing much else either, which makes every other number on the Service History tab unreliable at the same time.
Does this cover goods lifts and platform lifts?
Mostly. The lift details section has a type field covering traction, hydraulic, machine room-less, goods, platform and dumbwaiter, and the majority of the checks apply across all of them. Hydraulic specifics have their own line in the machine section.
What will need editing is the emergency and entrapment section for equipment that does not normally carry passengers, and the door checks for platform lifts with a different door arrangement. The Word version exists for exactly that kind of adaptation.
Can I edit and rebrand this template?
Yes. It is free to use, edit, rename and put your own logo on, internally or for clients. No attribution required.
The Word version is the one to edit if your contract covers a different scope or you run lift types the checks do not quite fit. The Excel version is the one to use if you want the readings, the obligations table with days to go, and the Service History tab that trends brake gap, callouts and door share across visits.
In one paragraph
An elevator maintenance checklist is a document about doors and about dates, more than it is about the machine. Start with the contract level and what it excludes, and with the date of the last thorough examination, because the examination is a separate obligation by a separate party that buildings routinely assume the monthly visit has covered. Then work the doors first, testing the reversal device low as well as high. In the machine room, measure the brake gap and write the number down rather than confirming the brake works, because that number across visits is the only warning the component gives. Check the pit for water every time. Test the emergency line all the way to a person answering rather than to a bell ringing. Then close on the obligations table rather than on the checks, with the next service and the next examination recorded as two different dates.
The template is the floor, not the ceiling
Take the checklist; it will run one visit properly and give an examiner something to read. When a folder of service sheets stops being enough, a connected CMMS runs the regime: every lift a record with its own callouts and parts, readings that trend instead of sitting in a file, the thorough examination as a dated obligation that chases itself, and the question of whether a provider is earning its contract answered as a report rather than reconstructed from a year of paper.
