Data-centre maintenance contracts: how to tell if a UPS, generator or chiller quote is high

Before you sign or renew a maintenance contract for UPS, generators or chillers, make the supplier price each asset per year. Ask for the response time, the visits and the parts written beside each price. Without that breakdown nobody can tell whether a quote is high.

Public award notices show the problem. On 20 August 2026 the IT agency of Spain’s social security system awarded 24-hour preventive and corrective maintenance of the UPS systems in its Madrid data-processing centre. The price was €143,317 for 24 months, about €71,700 a year. The award notice does not say how many UPS units that buys.

This guide is for operators of sites from 1 to 20 MW who buy maintenance without a procurement team. It sets out what to ask for, the signs of a high quote and what the law already fixes.

Key takeaways

• A maintenance quote can be compared only when it is priced per asset and per year, with the response time, visits and parts stated.
• Public award notices give a contract total and a term, and seldom the number of assets. Use them for the terms they set, and price your own site from your asset list.
• Compare scope before price: response time, hours of cover, parts, battery replacement, visits, term and indexation.
• Chillers and gas fire suppression have legal leak-check intervals under the EU F-gas Regulation. A quote that schedules more checks should say why.
• The quote check in Operate turns one quote line into a scope review and the questions to ask, and for UPS, generator and cooling contracts it lists the vendors in your country.

Why there is no public price to compare against

Maintenance prices for critical plant are rarely published as a list. A supplier prices your asset list, your site and the response time you ask for, so the number only exists once you ask.

What public buyers paid is published. In the EU they post procurement notices, award notices included, on TED, the online Supplement to the Official Journal of the EU. In the UK they post notices about procurements and contracts on Find a Tender. Since 24 February 2025 it carries both above and below threshold notices for new UK procurements.

An award notice gives the total for a lot, the term, the winner and often the award criteria. Most do not list the assets. A total without a count tells you how big a contract was. It tells you little about the price of keeping one UPS running.

Make the quote comparable: seven lines to ask for

1. The asset list. Make, model, rating and age for each UPS, generator set and chiller, so every price has a denominator.
2. A price per asset per year, kept apart from any one-off work.
3. The response time and what it measures. It can mean answering the phone, arriving on site or starting the repair. Ask which hours it covers: business hours or around the clock.
4. Planned visits per year, and what each visit includes.
5. Parts. Which are included, which are not, and the price list or discount used for the rest. Battery strings and consumables such as filters, oil and coolant get their own line.
6. Call-out and hourly rates for work outside the contract, at night and at weekends too.
7. Term, price indexation, notice period and whether the contract renews by itself.

With these seven lines on two quotes you compare like with like. Without them a cheaper quote may simply cover less.

Signs that a quote is high

• The shortest on-site response, around the clock, for every asset. A redundant UPS module or a second generator may live with a slower response than a cooling plant with no spare.
• Batteries or major parts folded into the annual fee, with no separate price and no replacement date.
• Leak checks or inspections scheduled more often than the law or the manufacturer asks, with no reason given.
• A term of several years with an indexation clause that names no published index.
• Automatic renewal with a long notice period.
• Only one supplier asked. Get at least three quotes on the same asset list.

How public buyers write the service level

Award notices are useful for their terms even when the price says little. Berlin’s public IT service centre, ITDZ Berlin, awarded maintenance for its data centres in December 2022. For the building automation lot and the cooling and air handling lot, the notice requires repair work to start on site within 3 hours of a fault report. Outside office hours, at weekends and on public holidays an on-call service had to cover emergencies.

Bidders also had to inspect the plant before they bid, and offers made without a site visit were excluded. Asking for a site visit is a cheap way to get quotes that price the same plant.

The Spanish UPS award weighted price at 90 points and response time at 10. That split shows what the buyer valued. If response time matters more to you, say so in your request for quotes, and ask bidders to price each response level separately.

To find awards close to your own scope, search TED by CPV code and by the word for data centre in the buyer’s language. The Spanish notice is filed under CPV 50711000, repair and maintenance of electrical building installations.

Asset by asset: what drives the price

UPS

Ask whether each visit includes a test of every battery string, and whether firmware updates are inside the fee. Ask the same for fans and capacitors. Price the battery replacement as its own event, with a planned date, so it does not hide in the annual fee. For a modular system, ask for a price per module.

Generator sets

Ask for the annual service, the load test and the fuel checks as separate lines. If the site load cannot be used for the test, the quote should say whether a load bank is included. Compare quotes only for sets of the same rating, and tell bidders how many hours each set runs a year.

Chillers and other cooling

Refrigerant leak checks are set by law. The EU F-gas Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2024/573, requires leak checks on equipment holding 5 tonnes of CO2 equivalent or more of the listed gases. Below 50 tonnes the check is due at least every 12 months, from 50 tonnes every 6 months and from 500 tonnes every 3 months.

A leakage detection system doubles each interval, to 24, 12 and 6 months. From 500 tonnes such a system is compulsory. The checks on refrigeration and air conditioning must be done by certified people.

Ask the supplier to list each circuit’s charge in tonnes of CO2 equivalent and the interval that follows from it. Then set the visits in the quote against that legal minimum.

Gas fire suppression

Gas extinguishing systems that hold fluorinated gases fall under the same leak-check rule. The regulation treats that duty as met when the existing inspection regime follows ISO 14520 or EN 15004 and runs as often as the leak-check interval requires. One inspection can then serve both purposes, and the quote should charge for one.

Check your quote

The quote check in the Operate section takes one line of a quote: the package, the country, the price and the VAT. For UPS, generator, cooling and fire-system maintenance it returns the scope to review and the questions to ask before you sign. For UPS, generator and cooling contracts it also lists the vendors serving that package in your country.

A price band appears only where we hold enough comparable public prices. For maintenance contracts none passes that test yet, and the check says so. Nothing you enter is stored. Check a maintenance quote.

Limits

The award figure is one contract total from one public buyer, as published on TED. It covers whatever that tender included and does not state the number of units, so it is no benchmark for your site. Public buyers also tender under rules that private operators do not follow. Read it as an example of what a notice shows, and price your own contract from your asset list.

Cite this: ScienceShot, Data-centre maintenance contracts: how to tell if a UPS, generator or chiller quote is high, October 2026, scienceshot.com.