How to maintain a treadmill

Written by Jamie Miller, Founder & EditorLast checked 18 September 2026

Four things cover most of it: keep the area under the machine clean, keep the belt centred and correctly tensioned, lubricate the deck if your manual says to, and unplug it when you are not using it. Everything else is either a repair or a job for an engineer.

After each use

Wipe sweat off the console, handrails and frame. Sweat is salty and corrodes the electronics and fixings faster than anything else a home machine meets.
Unplug it, or switch it off at the machine. It also removes the chance of a child starting it.

Weekly, roughly

Vacuum around and underneath. Dust drawn into the motor housing is the single most avoidable cause of overheating.
Look along the belt edges for fraying, and check it is still running centrally.
Check the machine is not rocking. An unlevel machine twists the frame and puts the belt off track.

Every month or two

Check belt tension. You should be able to lift the belt a few centimetres off the deck at the centre. If it slips underfoot.
Check the visible frame bolts are tight, particularly on a folding machine where the mechanism takes repeated load.
Run it up through its speed range with nobody on it and listen for anything new. What different noises point at.

To your manual's schedule

Lubrication is the one genuinely model-specific job. Published intervals commonly fall somewhere between three and six months for home use, but some decks are pre-lubricated or coated and must not be lubricated at all, and doing it anyway can void the warranty.Lubricating the belt, and what not to use.

Not your job

Anything behind the motor cover. Motor brushes, the control board, the drive belt and the wiring all sit next to mains voltage, and capacitors in there can hold a charge after the plug is out. How to describe a motor fault so somebody qualified can act on it.

What we have not established

We have not run a maintenance schedule on any machine and hold no data on how these intervals affect lifespan. The list above is assembled from manufacturer maintenance sections, and where your own manual disagrees with it, follow the manual.How we review.