HVAC service pricing: a price list you can actually defend
Most shops looking for an HVAC service price list want two things at once: a sanity check that they aren’t wildly off, and something to put in front of techs so quotes stop varying by who’s driving. The list below does both. Every number in it is worked from task time, part cost, overhead, and margin — so when your costs don’t match the assumptions, you can redo any line yourself instead of guessing.
Where these numbers come from
A service price is not a market average. It is arithmetic on four things you control, and it’s worth seeing the formula once before reading the table:
- Task time — the realistic on-site time for the repair, including diagnosis, setup, and cleanup.
- Loaded labor cost— $50 per billable hour in the table below. That’s a $28-an-hour tech after payroll burden, truck, tools, and the hours that never make it onto a ticket.
- Overhead factor — 1.25, meaning rent, office, software, insurance, and advertising run about 25 percent of direct job cost.
- Target margin — 55 to 65 percent gross, which is where the range in the last column comes from.
Price = (task hours × loaded rate + part cost) × 1.25 ÷ (1 − margin). Each of those four inputs gets worked properly in the HVAC pricing guide; this page is what falls out of them for the repairs you run most.
The two lines shops get wrong most often
Cheap parts.The capacitor is the tell. A shop pricing on “double the part plus an hour” charges about $86 for that job and loses money on it, because an $18 part and a real truck visit have almost nothing to do with each other. Cheap-part tasks have to carry a high markup multiple or the labor has to carry them outright — that’s what tiered markup exists for, and the tiers are in the HVAC parts markup guide.
Expensive parts.The compressor is the opposite problem. At a flat 2× the part alone you’d ask $1,700 and give away a full day of crew time; at 65 percent margin on everything you drift toward $3,900 and lose the job to a condenser swap quote. Big-ticket repairs need a lower margin percentage and a repair-versus-replace conversation, not the same multiplier as the capacitor.
Whatever your prices end up being, record the part cost next to each one. It’s the only thing that lets you check a margin later. In one real 86-service Housecall Pro book we audited, 83 services had no cost recorded at all — so nobody could see that a compressor task was selling at a negative 20 percent margin. On the 3 services that did carry cost, the undercharge added up to $71,888 a year from just the 3 items that had cost data, at 12 sales each per year —
the item-by-item working is here.
The service call fee, and what it’s really for
The diagnostic is the one line on the list that isn’t built from a part. It exists to cover the truck roll on the visits that go nowhere — the ones where the homeowner decides to think about it, or the unit turns out to be fine. $89 to $129 is the residential norm. Whether you credit it against an approved repair is a sales decision, and a reasonable one, as long as the repair prices already have that credit built into them. Applying it after the fact just moves the discount somewhere you can’t see it.
Maintenance agreements price differently
A tune-up visit is about an hour and a half of loaded labor before overhead, so any agreement priced under roughly $150 a year is a loss leader on the visit itself. That can be exactly right — agreements reliably surface repair work and keep the customer from calling the next van that answers — but it should be a decision you made, not a number you inherited. Price the visits at cost, then decide how much of the repair pull-through you’re willing to pay for up front.
Don’t copy the list. Rebuild it on your costs.
The table above assumes $50 per billable hour. If your techs actually cost $58 — very normal for a shop where PTO, training, and shop time eat more of the year than expected — every price in it is roughly 10 percent low, straight off your margin. Work out your real number with the HVAC labor rate calculator first, then re-run the tasks that make up most of your tickets. Ten tasks usually cover 70 percent of the calls a residential shop runs, so the first hour of this work is worth more than all the rest of it.
Once the numbers are yours, they need to live somewhere a tech can reach on a driveway, which in practice means your field software rather than a spreadsheet. The free HVAC price book template is an import-ready starting structure with the task names and cost columns already laid out.
Where PriceTuneup fits
Everything above works in a spreadsheet, and the calculators here are free and account-free. What takes real time is the second half: repricing a few hundred existing services at your target margins, keeping part costs current, and getting the result back into Housecall Pro without breaking the import.
That’s what the done-for-you rebuild is: $249 one time to reprice your whole book and hand back import-verified files you own outright, with optional software continuity afterward at $299/yr. It’s backed by the 60-Day Ticket-Lift Guarantee: If your average ticket doesn't go up within 60 days of importing your new price book, we refund the full price — and you keep every file. The rest of the pricing guides go deeper on labor rate, markup, and raising prices without losing customers.
Frequently asked questions
How much do HVAC companies charge per hour?
Most residential HVAC shops end up billing the equivalent of $120 to $180 per hour once overhead and margin are added to what a technician actually costs them. That is the effective rate baked into flat-rate task prices, not a number customers usually see — the tech underneath it costs the shop $45 to $60 per billable hour after payroll burden, truck, and unbilled time.
What is the average HVAC service call cost?
A diagnostic or service call fee of $89 to $129 is the common residential range, and it exists to cover the truck roll on visits that never turn into work. Shops that advertise free diagnostics still pay for those trips — the cost just gets buried in repair prices as a surcharge nobody sized on purpose.
How much should I charge to replace an HVAC capacitor?
Roughly $120 to $155 for a dual run capacitor, including the trip labor built into the task. That comes out of about half an hour of task time, an $18 part, an overhead factor, and a 55 to 65 percent target margin — not out of doubling the part, which on an $18 capacitor would leave you $18 for a truck visit.
Why do HVAC service prices vary so much between companies?
Because the two biggest inputs — loaded labor cost and billable hours — vary enormously by market and by shop. A tech paid $22 an hour in a low-cost market who bills 1,900 hours a year and a tech paid $34 who bills 1,500 differ by more than 60 percent in cost per billable hour before either shop has decided on a margin. Prices copied from a competitor carry that competitor's cost structure, not yours.
Should HVAC service prices change between summer and winter?
Keep the book price the same year round and manage seasonality with capacity and scheduling instead. Surge pricing on a July no-cool call is the kind of thing customers screenshot, and it undercuts the main advantage of a flat-rate book, which is that the same repair costs the same thing on every ticket regardless of who quotes it.
How often should an HVAC service price list be updated?
Review the full list once a year and spot-update any task whose part cost has moved more than about 10 percent. Motors, boards, and refrigerant have each jumped by 5 to 15 percent inside single years recently, so a list still priced on three-year-old supply-house costs hands that difference back on every ticket.
Check your ten busiest tasks
Put your own labor cost and part prices into the free calculator and see where your current prices land against the range above. If the gap is uncomfortable, PriceTuneup reprices the entire book for $249, one time.