Free HVAC Estimate Calculator

Add up your true direct costs — labor including burden, materials with markup, and job extras like equipment or disposal. Add a contingency for surprises if the job has any. That's your break-even, the floor you never quote below. Then add your profit on top: price = break-even × (1 + profit%). This calculator runs exactly that math as you type, and shows the result both ways — what you added on to your costs, and what share of the final price that leaves you — because the two numbers are easy to confuse and quoting on the wrong one is how a job loses money.

Burden is everything an hour of labor costs beyond the paycheck: payroll taxes (typically 8–10% of wages), workers' compensation (a few percent for low-risk trades, well over 15% for high-risk ones like roofing or concrete), liability insurance, and paid time off. All-in burden commonly lands between 15% and 40% on top of base pay — and forgetting it is one of the most common ways a profitable-looking job loses money. If you're solo and paying yourself, you can leave it at 0%.

Markup is a percentage added on top of your cost; margin is your share of the final price. Adding 100% on top — charging double your costs — is the same thing as a 50% margin. Quoting a markup when you mean a margin is one of the most common ways contractors underprice a job, so this calculator keeps it simple: you enter what you add on top — no cap — and it always shows what share of the final price that leaves you.

Work backward from your own numbers instead of copying competitors: add up what you want to earn in a year plus every cost of being in business, then divide by your realistic billable hours — most HVAC pros bill far fewer hours than they work. That result is your floor. Local demand, licensing, and skill decide how far above it you can go.

Somewhere between 15% and 50% is common practice across the trades, and it isn't padding: the markup pays for sourcing time, supply runs, returns, warranty callbacks, and the money you float between buying materials and getting paid. If the customer supplies materials, price the labor accordingly — you still carry the workmanship risk.

Changeouts run long on whatever the old system was hiding. The line set is undersized, or full of oil from a burnout, so now there is a flush or a new run through a finished wall. The coil case is wider than the furnace cabinet and somebody has to fabricate a transition. Going condensing orphans the water heater on a shared flue, which means a liner and another half day. The old thermostat wire has no C conductor and no clear path to pull one.

The services feeding the equipment cost you as often as the equipment does. The breaker and the wire that carried an old condenser will not carry the new one. The gas line that fed a small furnace is undersized for a bigger one once you add up everything else on it. A mini split needs a dedicated circuit that does not exist. The condensate has nowhere to fall, so it becomes a pump, a receptacle and a drain line through somebody's finished basement.

Access takes the rest. An attic in August gives you twenty minute stretches, a crawlspace gives you one working hand, and a rooftop unit waits on a crane slot you do not control. Weather sets its own clock, since you cannot verify a charge honestly when it is cold outside. Then the supply house has the coil two days out because the model was superseded.

This trade carries real material and most of it is brand tied. Your distributor decides which coil matches which furnace, so a changeout cannot be shopped around the way a box of fittings can, and a special ordered cased coil is often non-returnable once it ships. Matched systems are quoted as a pair for a reason: swap one half for another brand's and the rated performance the paperwork claims no longer describes what is installed.

Refrigerant is bought by the cylinder and billed by the pound, and the heel left in a jug you cannot fully empty is genuine waste. R-22 comes only from reclaim now, and the shift toward A2L blends keeps moving what a cylinder costs from one season to the next, along with which cylinders, hoses and gauges are rated for what you are working on.

Flex arrives in boxes and line set in coils, so every run leaves a remainder that fits the next job only if the sizes happen to match. The pieces that vanish off an estimate are the small ones: drier, Schrader cores, nitrogen, brazing rod, mastic and tape, the whip, the pad, the float switch. Warranty parts are their own kind of delay — free does not mean fast, and a board on back order holds the job while the customer counts days.

Free and unlimited, no account needed. The math runs in your browser and your pricing setup saves only on your own device — we never see your numbers. Printing or sending the estimate it makes counts as a document: your first 2 are free, with no account.