An HVAC flat rate pricing book is your whole price list with the thinking already done: every job you sell, a fixed price the customer sees upfront, and the cost that price has to clear. You can buy one on subscription, build one from a blank spreadsheet, or start from the free 61-task book on this page and re-price it on your own numbers in an afternoon.
What goes in the book
A working HVAC price list isn’t hundreds of rows — it’s the 40 to 80 jobs your shop actually quotes, organized so a tech can find one at the kitchen table. Five categories carry almost every residential book:
Category
What it holds
Diagnostics & service calls
The trip charge and the diagnostic fee — the two prices every customer hears first, so they carry your brand more than any other line.
Maintenance
Tune-ups, coil cleanings, filter programs. Priced lean on purpose: this is the category that earns the repair and replacement work.
Repairs
Capacitors, contactors, blower motors, refrigerant leaks. The bulk of the book, and where blank cost columns quietly bleed margin.
Replacements & installs
Condensers, furnaces, air handlers, water heaters if you cross over. Fewer rows, biggest tickets, least room for a guessed price.
Add-ons & materials
Surge protectors, float switches, pads, line sets by the foot. Small numbers that add up — and the easiest rows to forget to re-price.
The free 61-task version
The free book covers all five categories with 61HVAC tasks, each carrying a customer-facing description, a flat rate, and a real cost. Every price was built the same way: loaded labor plus parts, divided out to a 60% target gross margin on a $45/hr loaded labor rate with 25% overhead. Written as a formula, price = (labor + parts) ÷ (1 − target margin) — so a task with $80 of labor and parts prices at $200. The full download and field-by-field walkthrough live on the HVAC price book template page, and there’s a version for five other trades if you run plumbing or electrical trucks too.
Those baseline numbers are a starting point, not your cost structure. A shop paying $38/hr in a cheap market and a shop paying $52/hr in an expensive one should not be quoting the same flat rates — swap in your own labor rate before the book goes live.
The cost column decides whether the book works
Most pricing books fail in the same invisible way: the flat rates get filled in, the costs don’t, and from that day on nobody can say which jobs make money. In one real 86-service Housecall Pro book we audited, 83 services had no cost recorded at all, the worst measurable item was priced at a -20% gross margin, and the estimated undercharge came 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).
The fix doesn’t require re-typing anything. Upload the template — or your existing export — to the free Margin Leak Finder, enter your labor rate, overhead, and target margin, and it flags every row priced under target and hands back a corrected, import-ready file. It runs entirely in your browser, so your pricing never leaves your machine.
Free book or subscription book?
Subscription books like Profit Rhino and Coolfront maintain thousands of tasks and update parts pricing for you, at $179+/month (Profit Rhino) and $129+/month (Coolfront) on published list prices as of 2026-07. That maintenance is worth paying for when you’re running six-plus trucks across trades. For a 1-to-4-truck HVAC shop, a 61-task book you re-price yourself each quarter usually covers the same calls — the deeper question of how to set the rates themselves is covered in the HVAC flat rate pricing guide.
Frequently asked questions
What is an HVAC flat rate pricing book?
It's the list of every job your shop sells with a fixed, upfront price on each one — diagnostic fees, repairs, tune-ups, replacements — plus the cost behind each price. The customer sees one number before work starts instead of an hourly rate and a running clock, and the tech quotes from the book instead of doing math on a driveway.
How much does an HVAC flat rate pricing book cost?
The template on this page is free: 61 HVAC tasks with prices and costs filled in. Subscription pricing books run Profit Rhino at $179+/month and Coolfront at $129+/month (published list prices as of 2026-07), which buys you a much larger task library and ongoing parts-price updates. For a small shop, the free book plus an afternoon of re-pricing covers most of the gap.
What should be on an HVAC price list?
Six fields per task: a category, the task name your techs use, a customer-facing description, the flat-rate price, the cost (parts plus loaded labor), and a unit of measure. The cost field is the one most shops skip, and it's the one that lets you tell whether a job made money.
How often should I update my HVAC pricing book?
Re-check parts costs against your supplier invoices every quarter, and rebuild the labor rate once a year or whenever wages, insurance, or fuel move. A book priced on last year's costs looks fine on the screen and loses money on the truck.
Can I import this pricing book into Housecall Pro?
Yes. The template’s columns match Housecall Pro’s price book import wizard, so it loads without remapping — the step-by-step import guide walks through the wizard. It’s a plain CSV, so any software that imports a price list from a spreadsheet — or just Excel or Google Sheets — can open it too.
Or skip the re-pricing weekend
If working the book over line by line isn’t happening, The Margin-Right Rebuild is a $249 one-time service: we take your price book export, rebuild every price at your target margins, and hand back a file verified to import clean.