Deming wrote it in Out of the Crisis, in chapter 1 — “Chain Reaction: Quality, Productivity, Lower Costs, Capture the Market” — on page 11. Both the W. Edwards Deming Institute ↗ and Wikiquote’s sourced section ↗ cite it to the book, and a reader working through the chapter page by page logs it at the same page.
“Defects are not free. Somebody makes them, and gets paid for making them” W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Study, 1986), chapter 1, p. 11. First published 1982 as Quality, Productivity, and Competitive Position.
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1982, as Quality, Productivity, and Competitive Position (MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Study); retitled Out of the Crisis in 1986
In print today
The MIT Press (reissue, 2000)
Defects are not free. Somebody makes them, and gets paid for making them.
Chapter 1, p. 11
In the book the sentence opens a short passage in which Deming works out what a production line’s rework crew actually costs — the point being that repair labour is paid labour, invisible on no ledger. Because Out of the Crisis is still in copyright, we quote only the sentence itself and describe what follows rather than reproducing it.
The W. Edwards Deming Institute ↗ — the organisation founded in his name in 1993 — publishes the line with a source: Out of the Crisis, 2nd edition, Kindle edition, The MIT Press, page 9.
Wikiquote ↗ lists it under its sourced Out of the Crisis heading at p. 11, not under Misattributed. Libquotes ↗ carries the same p. 11 citation.
An independent reader’s notes on chapter 1 quote it as “Pg 11” ↗, sandwiched between other lines they log at pages 11 and 12 — corroboration from someone reading the physical book rather than copying a quote site.
The book’s MIT Press contents page ↗ shows chapter 1 beginning at page 1 and chapter 2 at page 18, so page 11 sits inside the “Chain Reaction” chapter, exactly where the argument about the cost of rework belongs.
Out of the Crisis was first published in 1982 and retitled in 1986, so it sits well inside US copyright — a 1931-or-later work by an identifiable author and publisher. The 1986 MIT edition ↗ and the 2000 MIT Press reissue are both still commercially available, so quote the sentence with attribution, but the surrounding pages are not free to reproduce.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
This one is real — but check the ones next to it
Nothing is stolen here: the sentence is Deming’s, in his own book, on a page anyone can look up. The fact-check runs the other way. Deming is one of the most heavily counterfeited names in management writing, and the lines most often printed beside this one on quote pages are not his at all.
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“You can’t manage what you can’t measure”W. Edwards Deming not his — nearly the opposite
Routinely pinned on Deming, and sometimes on Peter Drucker. Curious Cat’s Deming pages ↗ call it a misquote and point to page 121 of the same book, where Deming writes that the most important figures a manager needs are unknown or unknowable — and that management must account for them anyway.
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“In God we trust. All others must bring data.”W. Edwards Deming misattributed
The single entry in the Misattributed section of Deming’s Wikiquote page ↗ — the same page that lists “Defects are not free” among his sourced quotations.
Most management aphorisms flatter the reader. This one is an accusation, and it is aimed squarely at the accounting. Deming’s argument in chapter 1 of Out of the Crisis is that a defect is not an act of nature or a lapse of attention — it is work, performed on the clock, by someone drawing a wage.
That reframing is the engine of the chapter he called “Chain Reaction”: improve quality and costs fall, because you stop paying twice for the same unit. It is also why the sentence keeps resurfacing in software, healthcare and manufacturing talks — it turns an abstract virtue into a payroll line.
Somebody makes them, and gets paid for making them.
The number that follows, and a note on pagination
The sentences immediately after put a figure on it. Deming describes a manager tallying how much of a production line was doing nothing but rework, then reasons that if correcting a defect costs about what making it cost, roughly 42 per cent of that line’s payroll and burden was going into producing defective items and repairing them — after which the manager improved the processes and rework costs fell sharply inside two months. That continuation is transcribed on Goodreads’ Deming quotes page ↗. We could not open the printed page ourselves to check the figure against the book, so treat the 42 per cent as reported rather than independently confirmed.
Pagination shifts with the edition. The print editions put the line on page 11; the Deming Institute’s own entry ↗ cites page 9 of the MIT Press Kindle edition. Same sentence, different reflow.
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1900–1993 · American statistician, professor and management consultant
William Edwards Deming (October 14, 1900 – December 20, 1993) was an American statistician, engineer and management consultant who taught statistics at New York University’s graduate school of business from 1946 until his death, and at Columbia’s business school from 1988. In the summer of 1950 he trained hundreds of Japanese engineers and managers in statistical process control, work that led the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers to name the Deming Prize after him. American industry only caught up late: the 1980 NBC documentary If Japan Can… Why Can’t We? made him famous at home, he received the National Medal of Technology in 1987, and the W. Edwards Deming Institute was founded in 1993.
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Cite this
Chicago
Deming, W. Edwards. Out of the Crisis. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for Advanced Engineering Study, 1986, 11. First published 1982 as Quality, Productivity, and Competitive Position; reissued by The MIT Press, 2000.
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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Defects are not free. Somebody makes them, and gets paid for making them’?” Last verified 17 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/defects-are-not-free-somebody-makes-them-and-gets-paid-for/