Home Maintenance Calendar

How the calendar is built

The calendar is a filter over a fixed task list, not a prediction. Three jobs repeat every month — test the smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, change the HVAC filter, check under the sinks for leaks — and three more repeat quarterly, landing in January, April, July and October. The rest are seasonal: seven spring jobs, six summer, seven autumn and six winter, each dropped into the first month of that season for your climate.

Which month that is depends on the climate zone, and that is the only place your answers move a date. In the cold zone spring starts in April, summer in June, autumn in September and winter in November. In the moderate zone they start in March, June, September and December. In both hot zones spring starts in February, summer in May, autumn in October and winter in December — so air-conditioning service comes early and winterising barely registers. Tasks are then dropped if they do not apply: the sump pump, the gutters, the roof, the outdoor faucets and the attic need a house or a townhouse, the lawn and irrigation jobs need a yard, the pool jobs need a pool, and ice-dam prevention needs a cold climate and a house.

Each task carries our own estimate of the time it takes and a cost range, and the four figures at the top are simple sums of those estimates across the whole year: total tasks, total hours, the low and high ends of the cost range added up, and the share of tasks not marked as work to hire out. Every one of those estimates is ours. They are there to show which months are heavy and which jobs are worth a quote, not to price a contractor. The .ics file the page can hand you is generated in your browser from the same list, with each task dated to the first or the fifteenth of its month — it is a download, and this website never publishes or subscribes to any calendar on your behalf.

Every figure above was read out of the code that runs on this page. Where a number is our own judgement rather than a published one, the note says so and cites nothing. Method last checked 21 August 2026.