Maintenance has in recent years more and more become recognised as contributing to company profitability and competitiveness. Consequently, the need of selecting the most cost-effective maintenance for a certain component/equipment under certain circumstances has become more emphasised. For a certain component/equipment there might be more than one technically suitable maintenance policy to choose from. The most cost-effective maintenance policy should be selected. In this paper, the most popular selection methods have been introduced, discussed and compared using 11 criteria for identifying their weaknesses and strengths. Also, a study exploring maintenance selection methods in Swedish industry is conducted. Furthermore, a model for selecting and improving a maintenance policy based on cost-effectiveness is developed, tested and discussed in an application example. The model is designed to be user-friendly and usable for all types of maintenance policies. It can utilise historical data regarding failures if available and allow feedback and continuous improvements.