The True Cost of Hiring (and Losing) an HVAC Technician

Most contractors who lose a tech think about what it costs to post the job and run a few interviews. That number feels manageable — a couple hundred dollars in job board fees, maybe twenty hours of your service manager's time. They write it off as a routine cost of doing business.

That number is wrong by an order of magnitude.

When you account for everything — the posting costs, the time spent screening, the new-hire setup, the months of reduced productivity before someone reaches full speed, the callbacks on work that isn't right yet, and the revenue you didn't capture while the seat was empty — replacing one experienced service technician costs most residential contractors somewhere between $10,000 and $30,000. For a commercial tech with deep system knowledge and established customer relationships, the number climbs higher.

This is worth understanding clearly, because it changes how you think about retention, wages, and what "too expensive to keep" actually means.

The Direct Costs You Can Itemize

Start with what's easy to count.

Job board fees. A standard Indeed sponsored listing runs $5–$20 per day. A 30-day run costs $150–$600. Run it on two platforms — Indeed and a niche HVAC job board — and you're at $300–$1,200 before a single application comes in. If you go to a recruiter, you're looking at a contingency fee of 15–25% of first-year salary. On a $65,000 tech, that's $9,750–$16,250 — paid only if they stay through the probationary period, but still a check you're writing.

Screening and interviewing. A typical HVAC hire involves a phone screen, one in-person interview, and sometimes a practical evaluation. Your service manager or operations lead spends 4–8 hours across multiple candidates before making an offer. At a fully-loaded cost of $35–$50/hr for a supervisor role, that's $140–$400 per hire in internal labor — and that's only counting the candidate you actually hired. If you screen ten people to hire one, multiply accordingly.

Background check and drug screening. $40–$100, standard.

New hire paperwork and HR administration. Small but real. A few hours of office staff time.

Add it up and you're at $500–$2,000 in direct hard costs before the new person walks through the door. If you used a recruiter, you're already at five figures.

Truck and Tools: The Setup Cost Nobody Talks About

A new technician — even a fully experienced one — requires a configured service vehicle.

A stocked HVAC service van is not cheap to set up. The vehicle itself is a capital cost you're spreading over time, but the outfitting is immediate: manifold gauge sets, a recovery machine, a vacuum pump, leak detection equipment, refrigerant cylinders, a multimeter, and a basic hand tool complement. A complete setup for a service technician who arrives without their own tools runs $3,000–$6,000 depending on what you're supplying. If you provide uniforms (most companies that want to retain people do), add $300–$600 for the initial kit.

This is not a recurring cost — it's a one-time investment per seat. But when a tech leaves and you're filling that seat again, you're making that investment again for any consumables and tools that went with them.

The Productivity Gap: Three to Six Months of Partial Output

This is the largest cost most employers never put a number on.

A newly hired service technician — even someone with ten years of experience at another company — is not fully productive on day one. They don't know your customer base, your dispatch territory, your suppliers, your service protocols, or how your vehicles are stocked. They're learning your call management software. They're getting comfortable with the equipment types you specialize in.

Best-case scenario for an experienced tech: six to eight weeks before they're running at 70–80% of full productivity. More realistically, for a mid-career tech coming from a different market or a different residential/commercial split, figure three to four months before they're fully in stride.

What does that cost?

A productive residential service technician generates roughly $250,000–$350,000 in annual revenue for their employer, per industry benchmarks. That's around $4,800–$6,700 per week at full output. At 60% of that during a twelve-week ramp period, you're looking at a productivity gap of roughly $7,500–$10,000 compared to what you'd expect from a fully tenured tech. That's not a loss — it's just output that didn't happen. But it's real money that didn't come in.

On top of that, during the ramp period, you're pulling your experienced techs off calls to field questions, ride along on training jobs, or re-do callbacks. That's billable time coming out of your highest performers.

Callbacks and Warranty Calls: The Hidden Quality Cost

New technicians make more mistakes. This is not a knock on anyone — it's how it works. A tech who's still learning your systems, your customers' quirky equipment, and your diagnostic protocols will generate more return calls in their first four to six months than an established tech with years on your routes.

The average HVAC callback costs $150–$300 in direct labor and parts when the issue is minor. A misdiagnosis that leads to unnecessary parts replacement — common in the first few months — can hit $400–$700. If that pattern runs for six months across a full service route, you're looking at a meaningful drag on margin.

Customer experience takes a hit too. A new tech who fumbles a call or leaves a job site in worse shape than they found it reflects on your company. Repeat calls are a direct signal that something went wrong the first time, and customers notice.

Lost Revenue: The Empty Seat During Peak Season

Most HVAC contractors don't lose techs in February. They lose them in April, in October — the shoulder months when the field is busy and another company made a better offer.

An unfilled seat during peak cooling or heating season is real money. A residential service tech running eight calls per day at an average ticket of $350 generates $2,800 in revenue per day. Over a three-week gap between departure and your new hire's first day, that's $42,000 in revenue you either turned away or pushed onto other techs who were already at capacity.

You can't always backfill that lost capacity. Customers who call during a heat wave and hear "we're two weeks out" call someone else. Some of them don't come back.

What It Costs to Lose a Trusted Tech

The numbers above assume a clean transition — a tech leaves, you post the job, you hire someone with equivalent skills. The reality is often messier.

Experienced techs who have been with a company for three or more years carry relationships. They have customers who ask for them by name. They know the quirks of the equipment at your recurring maintenance accounts. They can run complex diagnostic calls without supervision. That institutional knowledge doesn't transfer when they leave.

Some of those customers will follow a tech to their new employer if the relationship is strong enough. You may not know this is happening for months — until a maintenance renewal doesn't come back and you trace it to an account your departed tech used to service.

This is difficult to quantify. It's real.

Building the Full Number

Here's a conservative estimate for replacing a mid-level residential service technician earning $62,000 a year:

Use a recruiter instead of posting directly, or lose the tech during peak season, and the total reaches the upper end or beyond it.

The numbers align with what trade industry analysts have found: SHRM's research puts the cost of replacing a skilled trade worker at 50–150% of their annual salary. For a $62,000 tech, that's $31,000–$93,000 at the outer range — which is high, but not unreachable when you factor in the revenue implications of an empty seat during a hot August.

The middle estimate — $10,000 to $30,000 — is where most residential HVAC contractors land when they actually run the math.

Retention Is Cheaper Than Replacement

This is where the comparison becomes useful.

What does it cost to retain a $62,000 technician who is thinking about leaving?

In most cases, the gap between what they're making and what they'd accept to stay is $3,000–$6,000 per year. Maybe a better health plan. Maybe a truck they can take home. Maybe a path to a lead tech role they can see from where they're standing.

The retention investment — a $4,000 annual raise, for instance — pays back in the first year compared to the cost of losing them and replacing them. Across multiple techs, across multiple years, the math gets better every time. A company with eight techs and a 20% annual turnover rate is spending $20,000–$46,000 per year on replacement costs. Cut that turnover to 10% and you've saved $10,000–$23,000 annually — money that could fund the raises that prevent the next round of turnover.

Our retention strategies guide covers the specifics of what techs say actually keeps them: pay transparency, schedule predictability, functional equipment, and management that doesn't create problems faster than techs can solve them.

For salary benchmarks by market and experience level, see our HVAC salary data.

Where the Recruiting Money Goes

One practical implication of these numbers: the channel you use to recruit matters, and not just because of posting fees.

General job boards like Indeed and ZipRecruiter charge for visibility in a feed full of unrelated roles. You're competing with warehouse jobs and delivery routes for the attention of candidates who may or may not have HVAC experience. The volume is there. The signal isn't always.

Niche HVAC job boards reach candidates who are actively looking for HVAC work specifically. The applicant pool is smaller, but the candidates who find you are already pre-sorted by trade. If you're comparing cost-per-qualified-applicant rather than cost-per-click, niche boards consistently perform better for trade roles.

HVACJobs.IO offers free job listings for employers who want to test the channel without upfront cost. Given that even a partial reduction in time-to-fill has meaningful revenue implications, the test is worth running.

For a full breakdown of how to write job posts that actually get qualified applications, see our HVAC hiring guide.

The Frame That Changes How You Hire

Most contractors think about hiring costs as a fixed overhead line — post the job, run interviews, extend an offer, move on. The actual cost of a bad hire, a slow hire, or a preventable departure is an order of magnitude larger than that framing suggests.

The contractors who build stable teams tend to think about it differently. They're not asking "can we afford to give this tech a raise?" — they're asking "what does it cost us if he leaves?" Those are different questions, and they produce different answers.

A $3,500 raise to retain an experienced tech is not a cost. It's a $10,000–$20,000 expense you didn't have to make.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does it cost to replace an HVAC technician?

The fully-loaded cost of replacing a mid-level residential service technician — accounting for recruiting, setup, productivity gap, callbacks, and lost revenue during the vacancy — runs $10,000–$30,000 for most contractors. The range is wide because it depends heavily on how long the seat stays empty, whether you use a recruiter, and how much peak-season revenue the vacancy displaces.

What percentage of an HVAC tech's salary is the true replacement cost?

Industry research from SHRM puts skilled trade replacement costs at 50–150% of annual salary, depending on experience level and market conditions. For a mid-career HVAC technician earning $60,000–$65,000, that translates to $30,000–$97,000 at the outer range — though most residential contractors land in the $10,000–$23,000 range for a typical transition when the vacancy is short and peak season isn't disrupted.

What's the average HVAC technician turnover rate?

Hard industry-wide data is limited, but contractors and trade publications consistently report annual turnover in the 20–35% range for service technicians, higher for install crews. At 25% turnover across a ten-tech shop, that's 2–3 replacements per year and $20,000–$70,000 in annual replacement costs.

How long does it take a new HVAC technician to reach full productivity?

For an experienced tech new to your company: six to ten weeks in a best-case scenario, three to four months more realistically. For someone earlier in their career or switching from a different work type (say, commercial to residential), figure four to six months before they're running at the level of a fully tenured tech on your routes.

Is it cheaper to hire an HVAC apprentice or an experienced technician?

The upfront cost of an apprentice is lower, but the productivity investment is much larger — two to three years to reach full independent output. An experienced hire costs more to recruit and set up but generates revenue much faster. The answer depends on your timeline and whether you have experienced techs who can mentor. Most contractors benefit from doing both: experienced hires for near-term capacity, apprentices as a longer-term pipeline investment.

What does an unfilled HVAC position cost during peak season?

A residential service tech running eight calls per day at an average ticket of $350 generates around $2,800 per day in revenue. A three-week vacancy during peak cooling or heating season represents roughly $42,000 in displaced or lost revenue — most of which either goes to a competitor or simply doesn't get captured. That's before accounting for customer attrition from extended wait times.

How do I calculate whether a retention raise is worth it?

Compare the annual cost of the raise against the estimated replacement cost if the tech leaves. A $4,000 raise on a tech earning $62,000 costs you $4,000 per year. If that tech leaves and replacement costs $15,000, the raise pays back in under four months of retention. In most scenarios, retention investment breaks even within the first year — and compounds over time as the tech's productivity and customer relationships deepen.

What's the most expensive part of replacing an HVAC technician?

For most contractors, it's not the job posting or the setup costs — it's the productivity gap and the revenue displaced during the vacancy. Three months of a tech running at 60% output, combined with two to four weeks of an empty seat during a busy period, easily accounts for $7,000–$15,000 of the total replacement cost. That's the number most employers underestimate.