The real estate industry is booming with the accelerating process of urbanization. The elevator is widely used as an important part of the building and its sales volume and usage have continued to grow. The frequent occurrence of elevator accidents aroused people’s attention in real life. Therefore, it is very important to strengthen the elevator maintenance process. This paper studies the optimal maintenance strategy of elevators within finite life from the perspective of preventive maintenance to reduce the failure rate of elevators. The number of elevator preventative maintenance and the time interval were found by establishing a target programming optimization model. Finally, the validity of the model is verified by numerical example.