“What should I charge for a maintenance plan?” Not whatever the shop across town charges. Its plan covers its visit, its perks and its costs, and you cannot see any of them. A plan price you can live with is built from the bottom up: what the visit includes, what it costs you to do it, what each perk costs you, and the margin you need on top. This article walks through those four steps with an example, then covers the part that makes plans worth the trouble: when the visits happen.
Step 1: define the visit with the industry standard
“Tune-up” means whatever the seller wants it to mean. The foreword of the Air Conditioning Contractors of America (ACCA) maintenance standard says as much: there are “many types and intensity levels” of seasonal tune-ups, clean and checks and maintenance services. The standard sets a minimum: ANSI/ACCA 4 QM, Maintenance of Residential HVAC Systems, reaffirmed as an American National Standard in 2024. ACCA describes it as “a nationally recognized, manufacturer-endorsed set of minimum tasks that should be performed for HVACR equipment maintenance inspections,” and says it gives contractors “a common platform for creating a maintenance program while allowing for bundling of different recommended corrective actions.” It is available from ACCA’s standards page.
The standard is a set of checklists numbered by equipment type: air distribution (checklist 5.1), controls and safeties (5.3), gas furnace (5.4), evaporator coil (5.7), condensing unit (5.8), and on through boilers, package units and accessories. Each task carries a frequency, semiannual or annual. The gas furnace checklist alone runs to 34 lettered inspection tasks, from the cabinet and the electrical connections to the burners, the gas pressure and the venting. Three parts of it shape a plan:
ENERGY STAR’s homeowner checklist describes the same visit in plain words: check thermostat settings, tighten electrical connections and measure voltage and current on motors, lubricate moving parts, check the condensate drain and the system controls; for cooling, clean the coils, check refrigerant and adjust the blower; for heating, check the gas or oil connections, gas pressure, burner combustion and heat exchanger. Your customers may have read that list, so your agreement should at least match it.
Then write down what one plan covers, for example one system (one furnace or air handler and one outdoor unit). Price a second system as an add-on, not as part of the base plan.
Step 2: cost the visit from your own numbers
Time ten real plan visits from leaving the previous job to leaving this one, drive included, and take the middle figure. Multiply by your loaded cost per billable hour, the number Your Real Hourly Cost works out. Add whatever consumables the visit includes, such as a standard filter, at your cost.
For scale only: the Bureau of Labor Statistics put the median wage of heating, air conditioning and refrigeration mechanics and installers at $29.33 an hour in May 2025. That is a national wage before taxes, insurance, the truck and the hours nobody pays for. Your loaded cost is higher, and it is the one to use.
Step 3: price every perk before you promise it
Perks are where plans lose money, because each one sounds free and none is.
Step 4: a worked example
Say an HVAC shop has worked out a loaded cost of $52 per billable hour, a plan visit takes 1.5 hours with the drive, and the visit includes a filter that costs $12. Its members spend an average of $300 a year on repairs and make 0.4 breakdown calls a year, and its diagnostic fee is $89. Every one of those inputs is invented for the example; put in your own.
| Item | Working | Cost a year |
|---|---|---|
| Two visits, labor | 2 × 1.5 h × $52 | $156 |
| Two filters | 2 × $12 | $24 |
| 10% repair discount | 10% × $300 | $30 |
| Diagnostic fee waived | 0.4 × $89 | $35.60 |
| Total cost | $245.60 |
To keep a 40% margin on the plan, divide the cost by 0.60 (markup vs. margin explains why you divide): $245.60 ÷ 0.60 = $409.33, so about $410 a year, or about $34 a month. Now test it. If the plan at that price will not sell in your market, change the plan, not the margin: drop the after-hours promise, make the discount 5%, or sell a one-visit plan for single-season equipment. Cutting the price while keeping every perk is how a plan gets busier and poorer.
Why the visit dates matter more than the price
ENERGY STAR tells homeowners to have a contractor do “annual pre-season check-ups,” and explains why in your terms: “Contractors get busy once summer and winter come, so it’s best to check the cooling system in the spring and the heating system in the fall.” That is the real value of a plan to a small shop. The cooling visits fill the weeks before the first heat wave; the heating visits fill the weeks before the first cold snap. In the example above, 200 members would mean 400 visits and, at 1.5 hours each, 600 technician hours that land in the shoulder seasons instead of the peaks.
So schedule members yourself. Book the spring visits in the late winter and the fall visits in the late summer, by route, rather than waiting for members to call. A visit booked on your calendar in April is a visit that does not compete with a no-cool call in July.
Renewals
Built this way, every line of the plan has a cost behind it, and the HVAC customer who asks what the plan includes gets a printed checklist instead of a promise.
General information, not legal or tax advice. Rules change and vary by state; check with the agency named above or a professional for your situation.