Victoria's capital maintenance plan obligations under the Retirement Villages Amendment Act 2025 (Vic) commenced on 1 May 2026. They are in force now.

Most operators know that. What is less clear is the practical question that follows: what does a capital maintenance plan actually need to contain, and how would you know whether yours would provide the transparency required if a resident asked to understand the forecasting behind it?

This article sets out what the requirement covers, who it captures, and the asset data that sits underneath a plan operators can defend.

What a capital maintenance plan is

A capital maintenance plan, or CMP, is a 10 year plan for the maintenance and replacement of a retirement village's items of capital.

The horizon is the important part. A 10 year view forces operators past the annual budget cycle and into a longer question: which assets will reach the end of their effective life inside the next decade, what will it cost to replace them, and how is that spend funded.

Victoria has also settled the funding question. Operators, not residents, fund capital replacement.

Who the requirement applies to

All 513 Victorian retirement villages are captured.

There is no size threshold and no age threshold. A single small village is subject to the same requirement as a portfolio operator running twenty sites. Operators who assumed a carve-out for smaller or older villages do not have one.

Why the 31 August 2026 date is not a CMP deadline

This is the most common misreading in the market at the moment, so it is worth stating plainly.

The 31 August 2026 grace period applies to contract and standard form changes. It does not apply to the capital maintenance plan.

CMP obligations commenced on 1 May 2026 and have applied since. There is no separate August start date for the CMP, and treating 31 August as the trigger leaves an operator working from a timeline that has already passed.

What a defensible capital maintenance plan contains

Meeting the requirement on paper and holding a plan you can defend are different things. In practice, a plan that survives scrutiny rests on five layers of asset information. For operators running multiple villages, the same five layers underpin your broader retirement village asset management plans.

A complete asset register

Everything starts here. If the register is incomplete, every forecast built on it understates future cost.

The gaps are usually predictable. Plant and equipment tracked at the village but never rolled up to the portfolio. Assets replaced years ago with no record of the replacement. Shared infrastructure such as roads, drainage and common area services that never made it into the register because nobody treated them as an asset.

Maintenance and overhaul history is another common gap. Where those tasks are not captured, the assumed condition of an asset and its remaining life will not reflect what is actually operating across the village.

Current condition data

A CMP built on assumed condition is a CMP built on guesswork.

Condition assessments age. A roof assessed as sound five years ago is not evidence of anything today. Operators should know when each asset class was last assessed, who assessed it, and against what standard.

Remaining effective life

Condition and age together tell you how much life an asset has left. That figure drives the timing of every replacement in the plan.

Where remaining life is set by default rules rather than observed condition, the plan will cluster replacements in the wrong years and produce a funding profile that does not match reality.

Better is a view of effective remaining life that accounts for how the asset is used, the duty it carries, and the maintenance strategy applied to it and to the area around it. That is what lets you defend against the assumption that an asset should be replaced simply because of its age, its design life or its depreciation schedule. The same principle sits behind asset management plan requirements more broadly.

Lifecycle forecasting and cost modelling

Once you know what you own, what condition it is in and how long it has left, you can build the 10 year forecast.

This is where a plan becomes useful rather than compliant. A good forecast shows the peaks, lets you test what happens if a major replacement is deferred, and gives the board a defensible number rather than an escalated version of last year’s budget.

A funding profile that connects to the forecast

The final layer is the money. The plan should show how the forecast spend is funded across the 10 years, and where the profile is under strain.

A forecast with no funding line attached is a wish list. A funding line with no forecast under it is a number nobody can explain.

Where operators typically come unstuck

Three patterns show up repeatedly.

The plan lives in a spreadsheet. It works until someone asks how a figure was derived, or the person who built it leaves. Version control, assumptions and audit trail all sit in one file and one head.

Condition assumptions are stale. The register is reasonable, but the condition data behind it is several years old. The forecast looks precise and is not.

There is no line of sight from planning to spend. The plan says one thing, the maintenance program does another, and nobody reconciles the two. When actual spend drifts from the plan, the plan is not updated, so the gap compounds each year.

None of these are compliance failures on their own. Together they mean an operator cannot show the reasoning behind their numbers, which is what matters when the plan is questioned and trust between residents and operator has to hold.

What good practice looks like

Operators who are in good shape tend to share the same habits.

• The asset register is a single source of truth, maintained continuously rather than rebuilt for each planning cycle

• Condition data is refreshed on a known cycle, with assessment dates visible

• Remaining effective life is driven by observed condition, not default assumptions

• The 10 year forecast can be re-run when inputs change, rather than rebuilt from scratch

• Planned and actual spend are reconciled, so variance is visible early

• Executive leadership works from the same numbers the facilities and asset teams deliver against

The test is simple. If a resident committee, an auditor or a board member asked how a replacement year or a cost figure was arrived at, could you defend the methodology behind it, and is that methodology repeatable, scalable and robust?

How AssetFuture supports capital maintenance planning

AssetFuture gives retirement village operators the asset foundation a 10 year plan depends on.

The AssetFuture Platform holds a structured, verified asset register and models future maintenance and replacement using condition-based lifecycle forecasting. Scenario modelling lets teams test funding and deferral options before committing to them, and reporting gives boards audit-ready outputs drawn from the same data the asset team uses.

AssetContinuity keeps condition and asset data current, so forecasts reflect the portfolio as it is rather than as it was at the last assessment.

For operators managing works and requests across sites, AssetOperate connects planning to what actually happens on the ground, closing the gap between the plan and the spend.

Talk to us about your capital maintenance plan. Book a walkthrough.