How much profit can an HVAC business make

HVAC can be a high-margin trade once you build a maintenance-plan base. A solo operator nets $8k-$15k a month after expenses in season, which settles to $72k-$154k a year once the slow months take their share. A 2-van team with 600 maintenance customers nets $14k-$28k. A real company with 6+ trucks and 2,000 plans clears $35k-$80k+. The thing that separates the levels is not skill, it’s the recurring base.

The three levels at a glance

What the table hides is that the jumps between rows are not gradual. Each level requires you to stop doing something you are good at, like running calls and quoting jobs, and start doing something you are unproven at, like dispatching, hiring, and managing a price book. Plenty of excellent techs stall at the first row forever, and plenty of average techs build the third row, because the level you reach is decided by how seriously you treat the plan count, not the wrench.

Solo operator: $18k-$28k revenue, $8k-$15k profit in season

A solo licensed tech who answers his own phone and does his own books can hit these numbers consistently in their second year. First year is half that while you build your review base.

Read the lines below as components, not as a column to add up. The volumes are in-season figures, no real month runs every line at the top of its range, and the same caveat applies to the two levels further down.

• Service calls. 40-65 a month in season at a $280-$520 ticket. At a $350 mid-range ticket that is $14k-$23k, and volume roughly halves in the shoulder months.
• Maintenance plans. 60-120 members at $20/mo = $1,200-$2,400, the one line that arrives whether the phone rings or not.
• Replacement installs. 1-2 a month at $7,500-$12,500 in season, and frequently zero in April or October.
• Typical monthly revenue. $18k-$28k in peak season, $7k-$15k in the shoulder months. That is the $25,000 July and the $7,260 October in the worked example below.
• Annual revenue. $180k-$280k

Cost structure for solo:

• Fuel + van maintenance: 6-9% of revenue
• Parts + materials COGS: 28-35% (lower if mostly service, higher if installs)
• Insurance + license + bond: $400-$700/mo
• Software, phone, marketing: $700-$1,400/mo
• Owner take-home: 40-55% of revenue after the above

Those average tickets are a pricing decision, not luck. Flat-rate pricing, meaning a fixed price per task from a price book with a $129-$159 diagnostic fee credited toward the repair when the customer approves the work, consistently beats hourly billing on both ticket size and close rate. The credit is what makes it work psychologically: the customer is not paying for a visit and then a fix, they are paying for the fix and the visit came free. Hourly billing caps your income at your hours; flat-rate caps it at the value of the problem you solve.

Getting past the top of the solo band takes a second van, not longer days, because one tech can only run so many calls. See how to grow for the path past solo.

2-van team: $45k-$90k revenue, $14k-$28k profit

Once you add a second tech and a part-time CSR or dispatch, you double calls but triple complexity. Margins compress because labor is now the biggest line.

• Service calls. 100-160 a month in season at a $300-$550 ticket. At a $425 mid-range ticket, 130 calls is about $55k, the base load of a busy month.
• Maintenance plans. 350-700 plans at $20/mo = $7k-$14k recurring, before anyone picks up the phone.
• Installs. 4-8 a month at $8k-$13k in season, one or two in the shoulders.
• Typical monthly revenue. $50k-$80k average, $90k+ in peak months
• Annual revenue. $600k-$950k

Where the money goes:

• Two techs at $28-$38/hr base + spiff = $14k-$22k/mo
• Part-time CSR/dispatch at $20/hr = $3k-$4k/mo
• Parts + materials: 30-37% COGS
• Two vans, fuel, insurance, license, bond: $3k-$5k/mo
• Marketing: 6-9% of revenue
• Owner take-home: 18-32% of revenue

When you make this jump, hire a service tech first, not an office manager. A tech who turns $25k-$40k a month of revenue covers his own wage in the first week of each month; an admin hire is pure overhead until there are enough jobs to coordinate. Most failed scaling attempts in HVAC trace back to hiring for comfort (someone to answer the phone) instead of hiring for capacity. The full sequence is in when and how to hire staff.

Notice what happened to margins between levels: the solo keeps 40-55% of revenue and the 2-van owner keeps 18-32%. That compression is not failure, it is the price of building a machine that earns without your hands on the gauges. The owners who panic at the first margin dip and let their tech go in a slow month end up back at level one, now with a reputation as an employer who does not keep people through winter.

The owner stops turning wrenches around month 14-20 if the plan base is solid.

Established company: $150k+ revenue, $35k+ profit

Once you cross 5-6 trucks, a service manager, and 1,500+ maintenance customers, this becomes a real business and a sellable asset.

• Service calls. 400+/mo at $320-$600 average = $128k-$240k
• Maintenance plans. 1,500-3,500 customers = $30k-$70k/mo recurring (this is the moat)
• Replacements + installs. 15-30 a month at $8k-$13k in the peak seasons, a fraction of that in the shoulders
• Typical monthly revenue. $150k-$280k
• Annual revenue. $1.8M-$3.4M

A well-run shop nets 18-24% on revenue at this scale. Owner take-home of $35k-$80k/mo is realistic because take-home is net margin plus the management salary you pay yourself, not margin alone. Exit multiples are often quoted at 4-7x EBITDA for companies with strong maintenance-plan bases. That is a broker rule of thumb that varies with size, market, and buyer, so get a valuation rather than planning around it.

The multiple is the part most owners discover too late. A buyer is not paying for your trucks or your tools; those are worth auction value. They are paying for 2,000 households contractually scheduled to be visited twice a year, each visit a fresh chance to quote a replacement. Two shops with identical revenue can sell for very different prices purely on the plan base, which means every plan you sell this year is worth $20 a month now and, to a buyer, a multiple of that.

The seasonality tax (and how plans pay it)

Cooling revenue peaks June through August. Heating peaks December through February. In between sit the shoulder months, April-May and September-November, when nothing is broken and the phone goes quiet. The seasonality tax exists in every climate; the only question is whether you pre-pay it with maintenance plans or pay it with payroll anxiety.

Plans fix the shoulders twice over. The membership fee arrives whether the phone rings or not, and the included tune-ups get scheduled into exactly the months when call volume dies, which keeps you, and later your techs, productive in the dead zones. That is also why spring and fall are when you sell plans hardest: the spring tune-up pitch lands in April and the fall furnace check in September, right when the homeowner’s wallet is open and your calendar is not.

The pattern behind all three traps is the same: peak months feel like the real business, and they are not. The real business is the twelve-month average, and the plan base is the only lever that moves it. A plan base also needs new customers arriving to feed it, so if the calendar is the bottleneck, see our Google and Meta lead generation for HVAC companies. For the front-end budget you need before any of this revenue exists, see how much you need to start an HVAC business.

Where these numbers come from

• What an employed technician earns, for comparison: the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a median annual wage of $61,010 for heating, air conditioning, and refrigeration mechanics and installers in May 2025, with the 10th percentile under $40,050 and the 90th over $95,210. About 6 percent are self-employed, and the wage series excludes them, so an owner’s profit is not directly comparable.
• Refrigerant rules that affect your costs: the EPA’s Section 608 requirements cover technicians who maintain, service, repair, or dispose of equipment that could release refrigerants.

The ticket sizes, plan counts, plan prices, cost percentages, take-home shares, and exit multiples are planning estimates and broker rules of thumb, not published statistics, and they swing by climate and market. The worked example and the annual totals are our own arithmetic from the figures stated beside them. Rebuild the model with your own average ticket, your own plan count, and a written valuation if you plan to sell.