There is a specific moment that costs HVAC contractors more money than any other, and it happens in the second week of July.
It is ninety-six degrees, the phone has not stopped since six in the morning, and you are standing at a condenser with a bad capacitor. You know what this costs. You have done it four hundred times. And somewhere in the back of your head is the thought that this customer is desperate, everybody is booked solid, and you could probably get more.
Whatever you decide in that moment, you will decide something different in March at the same job. That is the problem a price book solves, and it is worth more than the arithmetic.
Here is what is inside ours. Philadelphia metro calibration, 2026.
190 services, and why the count is lower than the other trades
The HVAC book carries 190 line items against 320 for plumbing and 250 for electrical. That is not a smaller book, it is a differently shaped trade.
HVAC work concentrates. A very large share of your service revenue comes from a short list of failures that repeat constantly: capacitors, contactors, ignitors, flame sensors, condenser fan motors, low charge, and clogged drains. Those repeat so reliably that the book can go deep on them instead of wide. The install side then splits by tonnage and by scope rather than by a hundred small variations.
A book with a thousand HVAC line items is padding the count with services you will perform twice a decade. What you want is the forty things you do every week priced exactly right, and the rest priced sensibly.
Real line items from the HVAC book
The service call itself
- Diagnostic and dispatch: $99 (market range $99 to $149)
- Run capacitor replacement: $200
- Start capacitor: $210. Dual-run capacitor: $210
- Compressor hard start kit: $320
- Hot surface ignitor: $320
- Condenser fan motor: $730
- TXV replacement: $1,070
Which means the single most common call in the trade, a summer no-cool that turns out to be a run capacitor, totals $299. Ninety-nine for the diagnostic, two hundred for the repair. Every time.
The $200 capacitor, taken apart
This is the line customers argue with most, so it is the one worth showing in full. The part is about twenty dollars. The price is two hundred. Here is the rest of it.
Labor is roughly forty-five minutes on site once you include shutting down safely, discharging a capacitor that holds a lethal voltage even with the system off, pulling and matching the correct microfarad and voltage rating, installing, and running the unit long enough to confirm the compressor and fan both come up clean. Add the truck stock that let you carry the right cap instead of driving to a supply house. Add the warranty you are carrying on the repair. Add overhead recovery, which is the office, the insurance, the van, and every hour you spent driving and quoting and not billing.
Two hundred dollars. And notice that the diagnostic time, the part where you actually worked out that it was the capacitor and not the contactor or the fan motor, is not in that figure at all. That sits in the $99 dispatch.
The reason this matters is that "the part is twenty dollars" is a conversation you will have several hundred times, and the contractor who can answer it calmly and specifically keeps the job. The one who gets defensive does not.
Maintenance agreements, and where they sit in the book
Maintenance plans are priced in the book as their own lines rather than treated as a discount scheme bolted onto repairs. A tune-up has a price. A two-visit annual agreement has a price. The member discount on repairs is a percentage set once on the settings sheet, which means it applies consistently instead of becoming a negotiating chip you reach for when a customer hesitates.
That last part is the whole point. A discount you invent at the door to save a wavering sale teaches the customer that your prices move if they push. A discount attached to a membership teaches them that your prices are fixed and membership is how you get a better one. Same money, completely different lesson.
Replacement
- 3-ton residential system replacement, full changeout: $6,090
- Condenser only, where the coil is sound: $3,930
- Zoning system: $1,500 to $3,500 by zone count and damper configuration
- Duct sealing and minor modification: $400 to $1,500
- Smart thermostat install where wiring needs adding: $200 to $400 plus the stat
The gap between $6,090 and $3,930 is the one that matters commercially. Those are two genuinely different recommendations for the same failed condenser, and having both priced in front of you is what lets you present the honest choice rather than defaulting to the bigger number and hoping.
Seasonal adjustment, which is the part unique to this trade
The HVAC book carries summer and winter peak rate adjustments that the other three books do not have, because HVAC is the only one of the four trades with genuine demand seasonality.
Here is the argument for building it into the book rather than improvising it in July. A seasonal adjustment applied consistently is a business decision. The same adjustment applied by feel, on the days you happen to be exhausted and the customer happens to be desperate, is something a customer will eventually describe to a neighbor in less flattering terms. The difference between those two things is entirely whether you decided it in advance and applied it to everybody.
The after-hours multiplier works the same way. A standard $299 capacitor call at eleven at night comes to about $450, and it comes to $450 for the pleasant customer and the unpleasant one, in a heatwave and in October.
The tiers, and the repair-or-replace conversation
Every one of the 190 lines carries Good, Better, and Best.
On a system in its sixteenth year that just took a $730 condenser fan motor and is now asking for a $1,070 TXV, the tiers are what make the conversation honest rather than salesy. Good is the repair. Better is the repair plus the maintenance that buys the unit another season. Best is the changeout, with the repair cost credited into the discussion rather than pretended away.
That framing matters because HVAC has an earned reputation problem. Customers remember the contractor who tried to sell a $9,000 system when the unit needed a $200 capacitor. Putting the repair on the page as a real option, with a real price next to it, is how you visibly are not that guy. It also means when you do recommend replacement, you have already established that you were willing not to.
IMC alignment, stated precisely
Categories follow IMC organization, so combustion air, venting, condensate, and clearance work sit together rather than scattered. When an inspection turns up a problem, the related line items are already grouped.
The book prices work, it does not tell you what the code requires. That is the IMC HVAC Code Quick Reference, and the changes worth knowing are in the 2024 IMC changes for HVAC techs.
What it does not do
- No OEM parts feed. Subscription products push quarterly manufacturer parts pricing. This does not. You update material inputs yourself, a few times a year.
- No app or FSM integration. It is an Excel workbook. If you dispatch six trucks through software, this is a supplement, not a replacement.
- It does not do load calculations. Sizing is a separate job. Our free tonnage calculator is a sanity check, not a Manual J.
- It arrives on one market's numbers. Philadelphia metro. Quote them unedited in Phoenix or in Maine and they will be wrong in different directions.
The bottom line
190 HVAC services across service, repair, maintenance, and installation. Tiered pricing throughout, seasonal adjustments for peak demand, emergency and after-hours multipliers, IMC-aligned categories, and a settings sheet that reprices everything from one field.
The thing it really buys you is that the number you say in July is the number you would have said in March. Customers cannot articulate why they trust one contractor over another, but consistency is most of it, and consistency is a document rather than a personality trait.
One more thing worth saying plainly. The reason to price the repair honestly on a sixteen-year-old system, rather than steering every aging unit toward a changeout, is not ethics for its own sake. It is that the customer you did not oversell in year sixteen is the customer who calls you in year eighteen when the thing finally dies, and that call is a $6,090 job that arrives without a competing bid. Consistent pricing is a retention strategy that happens to also be the right thing to do.
Multi-trade shop? The four-book bundle is $198 rather than $396.