I wish to define the distributionManagement values for all my projects in a common parent pom. parent pom.xml ${site.url} file:///Users/macuser/Sites ${site.base.url}/${project.artifactId} local ${site.url} The effective pom for this is as expected: file:///Users/macuser/Sites/parent-pom local file:///Users/macuser/Sites/parent-pom file:///Users/macuser/Sites file:///Users/macuser/Sites/parent-pom In child pom, I specify the parent pom only, no other elements. I expect the distributionManagement to inherit from the parent. 4.0.0 mlgiroux parent-pom 0.0.1-SNAPSHOT parent-pom-test pom The effective pom is strange: file:///Users/macuser/Sites/parent-pom-test/parent-pom-test local file:///Users/macuser/Sites/parent-pom-test/parent-pom-test file:///Users/macuser/Sites file:///Users/macuser/Sites/parent-pom-test The site.url property has been resolved as I expected, but the elements for project.url and distributionManagement.site.url that were defined in the parent as ${site.url} have the artifactId twice. As if I had specified ${site.base.url}/${project.artifactId}/${project.artifactId} Now, if I add the url and distributionManagement to the child pom as: ${site.url} local ${site.url} The effective pom is exactly as I expect with the artifactId specified exactly once in the effective values. file:///Users/macuser/Sites/parent-pom-test local file:///Users/macuser/Sites/parent-pom-test I think it is important to point out that the child is NOT a sub module of the parent. It specifies a parent, but it is itself a root module. This feels like a defect to me. Michael Giroux