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Cost RecoveryIndirect spend across ~50 categories, tested against the market Revenue ConversionWhere the pipeline leaks before it closes Technology & OperationsWhat you own, what you use, what you pay for anyway
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Nonprofit▸
Hospitals & health systems Human services Senior living & post-acute Community health & outpatient Behavioral health Community & economic development
Manufacturing Healthcare Education Retail & wholesale
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INDUSTRIES
The categories are the same everywhere.
Where they hide is not.
Waste, telecom, insurance and maintenance appear in almost every organization. What differs is which categories have no clear owner, which are already inside a purchasing arrangement, and which look unusual for a perfectly good operational reason. That is why we analyze each sector separately.
6
sectors studied separately
~50
indirect spend categories mapped
Each sector produced a different finding.
Not a different version of the same one. The categories showing the widest variation in our hospital cohort are not the same as those in senior living, and the reasons are usually operational before they are commercial.
Hospitals & health systems
The largest category is the least comparable.
Medical supply varies widely, and much of that difference reflects case mix, service lines and acuity rather than purchasing. It is also the category a hospital supply-chain team is most likely to watch closely. We would generally expect to leave it alone and look first at purchased services.
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Nonprofit & human services
Eleven major supplier relationships above six figures, on average.
The supplier base is relatively concentrated. Individual relationships may have been entirely reasonable when they were established as programs grew. The useful question is whether anyone has looked across those relationships as one portfolio since.
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Senior living & post-acute
Clinical categories cluster more tightly. Hospitality categories do not.
Pharmacy and medical supply sit closer to the peer median, while dining, insurance and plant-related categories show much wider variation. The categories that define the resident experience are often the ones where operating model and vendor structure matter most.
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Community health & outpatient
Technology often arrives with the funding.
An EHR under one program, a reporting tool required by another funder, a platform introduced through a partnership. Each may have been reasonable on its own, while the full portfolio may never have been reviewed as one system.
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Behavioral health
Travel is service delivery, not overhead.
Mobile crisis, community treatment, school-based services and client transport put staff on the road as a condition of the model. The question is whether fleet, fuel, mileage and vehicle insurance have ever been examined as one category.
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Community & economic development
The variation sits in property.
Buildings held for years, fleets that run daily and facilities that consume energy at scale create a cost structure very different from a service-only nonprofit. Property tax and utilities can look fixed because the bill arrives on a cycle.
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THE EVIDENCE FOR ANALYZING SEPARATELY
The most variable category is different in every sector.
For each sector, the single category where the widest share of organizations report spend well above their peer median — and what that category is. If one benchmark fitted every sector, these bars would name the same thing.
HospitalsProperty & sales tax
54%above median
Nonprofit & human servicesTravel
57%above median
Senior livingProperty & sales tax
71%above median
Community healthPharmacy
58%above median
Behavioral healthTravel
52%above median
Community developmentProperty & sales tax
52%above median
Method note. Share of organizations whose reported spend exceeds 1.5× the peer median for their sector and size. Peer groups of 50 or more. Above median is not overspending — it is a reason to ask why.
What every sector page has in common
The comparison is shown, not asserted
Every median carries the peer count beside it, so the benchmark can be judged rather than simply trusted.
Above median is not overspending
Variation identifies where context matters most. It is a reason to ask why, not a finding in itself.
Each page names what we would not pursue
Every sector has categories we would expect to leave alone. Each page says which ones and why.
WHY WE ANALYZE SECTORS SEPARATELY
A single indirect benchmark, without industry context, is close to meaningless.
The published ranges differ so widely between sectors that a general figure cannot inform a decision. That is the argument for analyzing each sector on its own rather than applying one number across all of them.
Indirect spend is put at 20–40% in manufacturing, 30–40% in utilities and 60–80% in services, technology and healthcare.
Efficio, 2026
A broader estimate places it at 25% to 40% of total company spend across all sectors.
Sievo
Retail indirect costs are put separately at 10% to 15% of sales.
McKinsey & Company

These describe ranges across industries, drawn from samples that may or may not resemble any particular organization. We publish the source and the sample size for each because a range is useful for orientation even when it cannot be a conclusion. None of them describe you. Our own sector analysis, by contrast, is built from the reported figures of 5,698 organizations.

CONTINUE
See how cost recovery works
The four stages, the categories, and the fee model.
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The research behind this
What we publish, and what we are building next.
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Who does the work
And why the method looks the way it does.
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Not listed here?
The method does not depend on fitting neatly into one of these six sectors. If your organization falls outside the published groups, the first conversation is still evidence-led: we look at what you report, identify the closest defensible comparisons, and tell you what may be worth examining — and what probably is not.
Start a conversationSee how cost recovery works
© 2026 Wylie Performance PartnersOutcomes, not activity.