A buyer's guide
What a commercial HVAC service agreement should contain
Most of these documents are two pages of reassurance and one page of exclusions. Here is what the clauses mean, where contractors pad them, and how to compare two quotes without being misled by the cover.
Published 30 October 2026 · reviewed against primary sources
The tiers
What are the three tiers of a commercial HVAC service agreement?
Almost every commercial agreement is one of three things: inspection only, preventive maintenance that also carries repair labour, or full coverage carrying parts and labour at a fixed annual price. The names vary between contractors; the three structures do not.
| Structure | What it buys | What you still pay |
|---|---|---|
| Inspection | Scheduled visits, consumables, cleaning, readings and a written report. | Every repair — parts and labour at the stated rate. |
| Preventive and labour | The above, plus repair labour at no further charge and a shorter response commitment. | Parts. Normally refrigerant as well. |
| Full coverage | Parts, labour and emergency attendance at a fixed annual figure — in effect insurance written by the contractor. | Refrigerant, and whatever the exclusions remove — the whole question. |
The Mechanical page sets out how Amalfi structures the same three tiers.
Why can't you compare two agreements by their tier names?
Because the names are not standardised and nobody uses them consistently. One contractor's preventive maintenance includes filters, belts, coil cleaning and condensate treatment. Another's is a visual inspection and a checklist, and the filters are billed. Compare the scopes, not the labels.
Silver, gold and platinum mean nothing at all, and even the honest labels drift. Many agreements sold as inspection-only quietly exclude the consumables, so the lowest tier buys a man with a clipboard rather than a man who changes anything. A well-written inspection tier includes them and charges only for repairs — a different product at a similar price. There is a published benchmark to measure against: ANSI/ASHRAE/ACCA Standard 180 sets out maintenance tasks and minimum intervals by equipment type, and few proposals reference it.
Scope
Which clauses actually decide what you get?
Seven of them, and the price on the front page is not one. These are the clauses to read first, and to argue about.
- The equipment scheduleEvery covered unit by location, make, model, serial, tonnage, age and refrigerant type. Without it the agreement is unenforceable in practice: a unit fails, the contractor says it was never covered, and nothing settles it. Pricing per ton with no schedule of tons is the commonest defect here.
- Visit frequency as a number"Regular scheduled maintenance" is not a frequency. Say four visits, or two, and in which months. Equipment here cools twelve months of the year, so the two seasonal visits common further north leave eight months unattended.
- What constitutes a visitA named technician on site, the full task list performed on every scheduled unit, and a written report filed — not a man who finds the roof hatch locked and logs the visit anyway. Say what happens when access fails, and whether a repair call-out can count as a scheduled visit.
- Filters and belts, included or billedState which, and state the quantity: filters are the most padded line in the trade. If included, name the grade and the changes a year. If billed, get the unit price in writing.
- Coil cleaning, chemical or rinseDifferent jobs at different prices, and the word "cleaning" covers both. A rinse removes surface debris; a chemical clean with dwell time removes what has driven into the fins, which on a salt-air condenser is the point. Name the method and the interval.
- After-hours and emergency ratesThree numbers: the straight-time rate, the overtime multiplier, and the hour overtime begins. Then the trip charge, and whether the agreement waives it. A contractor who will not put the multiplier in writing intends to set it later.
- The response time and its remedyA promise with no remedy attached is not a promise. Four-hour response appears in a great many agreements and in almost none is there a consequence for missing it. Ask what happens in the fifth hour. Without an answer, the number is marketing.
Who pays for refrigerant, and at what rate?
The owner pays, in almost every agreement at every tier, and the rate is where the largest single cost surprise in this market lives. An agreement that is vague about refrigerant is vague about the biggest number on next year's invoice.
The reason is supply. The phasedown has made R-410A a shrinking commodity and new equipment has moved to R-454B and R-32. Published trade pricing for R-410A has run across a very wide band — single figures to the mid-thirties a pound depending on the week and the supplier — and the rate billed to an owner is frequently a multiple of the cylinder cost. A twenty-ton rooftop unit may hold twenty to thirty pounds, so a unit that loses its charge twice in a year turns an open-ended per-pound clause into four figures.
So the clause needs four things. A rate per pound for each refrigerant type in your schedule rather than one blanket rate, since R-454B and R-32 do not cost what R-410A costs and your building probably has both. An annual or per-unit cap, above which the two of you have a conversation instead of an invoice. A stated position on whether leak search and repair labour are covered. And a recovery and documentation line.
That last point changed recently. The EPA's refrigerant management rule under the AIM Act took effect on 1 January 2026 and brought leak-rate tracking down to appliances holding fifteen pounds or more of regulated refrigerant, where the older Section 608 threshold was fifty. Triggers are commonly stated as ten per cent annualised for comfort cooling, twenty for commercial refrigeration and thirty for industrial process, with thirty days to repair and verify. A great deal of ordinary rooftop and walk-in equipment is therefore now inside a recordkeeping regime it was previously outside, and the obligation follows the equipment rather than whoever services it. Your agreement should say who keeps the records. Confirm what applies to your own plant with a qualified adviser rather than relying on a summary, including this one.
Commercial terms
What commercial terms should you negotiate before signing?
Term length, renewal, escalation, termination, assignment, markup and the condition survey. These decide what the agreement costs over five years and how easily you leave it, and they are printed rather than discussed.
Term and exit
- Term length. One year is normal. Three is negotiable for a price concession, worth something only if escalation is capped.
- Auto-renewal. Read it with the termination notice. Twelve-month renewal against a thirty-day window means two days of inattention cost a year.
- Escalation. A number, or a published index with a ceiling. "Subject to annual adjustment" is a blank cheque.
- Termination for convenience. On both sides, with a notice period and a refund of prepaid visits. An agreement you cannot leave for poor service is not a service agreement.
- Assignment on sale. Whether it transfers with the building, at whose option. A seller does not want a termination fee discovered at closing.
Money and condition
- Parts markup. Ask the percentage and whether it is shown on the invoice. A markup is normal trade practice; the question is whether you see it.
- Labour rate. Straight time, the overtime multiplier, the hour it starts, and whether holidays are a third tier.
- Minimum billing. A four-hour minimum on a twenty-minute reset is a real cost, as is portal-to-portal travel.
- Exclusions. Read this list first, before the inclusions. It is the only part of the document written with real care.
- The condition survey. Insist on one before the start date, with pre-existing deficiencies listed and carved out in writing. Without it a full-coverage contractor inherits your deferred maintenance, and will either price for the worst case or decline the claim.
The record
What should the owner receive from a service agreement?
A written condition report after every visit, photographs, readings logged so they can be compared across years, an asset register, and recommendations kept separate from work performed. An agreement does not only buy attendance. It produces a record, and the record is an asset.
Readings over time
One set of superheat, subcool, amp-draw and temperature-split figures tells you almost nothing. The same figures across eight quarters tell you which compressor is going. Readings are worth taking only if logged where you can compare them.
Recommendations, kept separate
Work performed in one column, work recommended in another, priced and dated. Mixed together they are a sales document. Separated, they are a capital plan — and an answer when a board asks why a unit was replaced.
An asset register you keep
The equipment schedule, maintained: units added and retired, warranty dates, refrigerant charges, service history by serial. Yours, in a format you can take elsewhere, not locked inside the contractor's software.
That record supports a warranty claim, which will be refused if documented maintenance cannot be produced; an insurance claim after a water escape or a storm loss; and a sale, where diligence marks an undocumented mechanical plant down to replacement cost and a documented one not.
Red flags
What are the red flags in an HVAC service agreement?
Six, each of which should stop the signature until it is answered. None means the contractor is dishonest. All mean the document was written to be read quickly.
Filters at several times trade price
A padded consumable is the oldest margin in the trade, and invisible, because nobody checks a filter price. Ask for the per-filter price and the annual quantity in writing. Well above supply-house cost, and the discount on the headline price is being recovered here.
A response time with no remedy
Four hours, two hours, same day — worthless unless something happens when it is missed. With no consequence attached, price the agreement as though it carried no response commitment.
Auto-renewal with a short window
A twelve-month renewal against a thirty-day cancellation notice, running from a date nobody diarised. Ask for sixty days, a written reminder, or both. The easiest clause to improve, and the one most often left alone.
Blanket exclusion for corrosion
"Acts of corrosion", "environmental damage" — this excludes the likeliest failure mode on a Florida coastal property. Chloride-driven coil and cabinet corrosion is what kills equipment within sight of the water, so an exclusion that wide removes the main thing you were covering.
Refrigerant per pound with no cap
An open-ended rate on a commodity in a phasedown, applied to a unit that may need its charge twice. Cap it annually, and state a rate by refrigerant type.
"Full coverage" that excludes compressors
The compressor is the expensive part. Coverage that excludes it, caps it, or covers it only where a prior condition report blesses it is a labour agreement with a better name.
Method
How do you compare two HVAC service quotes fairly?
Normalise them onto the same equipment list, visit count and five-year horizon, then add the chargeable items each leaves out. It takes an hour, and routinely reverses the ranking.
- Write your own equipment schedule firstBefore either contractor quotes, and issue the same one to both. Quotes priced against two different inventories cannot be compared, and most are priced against whatever the salesman counted from the car park.
- Fix the visit count yourselfTell them both how many visits you want rather than letting each propose its own. Two visits will always look cheaper than four. Fix the frequency and the price difference means something.
- Build a one-page scope gridRows for each task — filters, belts, condenser and evaporator cleans, condensate treatment, amp readings, refrigerant check, controls, coil coating. Columns for the two quotes. Mark each cell included, chargeable or silent. Silent is the answer that matters: go back and ask.
- Price the exclusions, not the inclusionsTake the three likeliest failures on your plant — a compressor on the oldest unit, a condenser coil, a controls board — and ask each contractor in writing what they would cost. The annual fee is the smaller half of the five-year number.
- Add the rate card to the annual feeEstimate your repair hours from last year's invoices, apply each contractor's rates, add trip charges and parts markup, and add that to the fee. A low fee with a high rate card loses most of the time.
- Check the licence class against your largest unitNot only that the contractor is licensed, but that the classification covers your plant. Verify it on the state licence record, not the proposal.
Agreements here are priced per ton per year, per square foot, or per unit per visit; current ranges are on the Mechanical page.
What is specific to Florida in a service agreement?
Three things worth raising with your own counsel: the licence classification, the limits of the state's automatic-renewal statute, and the fact that routine maintenance has generally not been treated as lienable work. None of this is legal advice, and none of it should be relied on without your own adviser reading your document.
Licence classification. Florida's contractor statute defines the air-conditioning classifications by scope, not only by trade. A Class B certification is limited to twenty-five tons of cooling and 500,000 Btu of heating in any one system; Class A and the mechanical classification are unlimited in that respect, and the mechanical classification also reaches boilers and fuel-gas piping inside a building. If your largest system is thirty tons, the class matters.
Automatic renewal. Florida has a statute on the automatic renewal of service contracts requiring conspicuous disclosure of the renewal provision and, for terms of twelve months or more, written notice between thirty and sixty days before the cancellation deadline. The point for a commercial reader is the word consumer: by its terms the protection runs to individuals, and excludes a person contracting on behalf of a business. An owner signing through an LLC should negotiate the notice window into the contract rather than assume the statute covers it.
Liens. Florida's construction lien law attaches to work that permanently improves the property, and Florida appellate decisions have repeatedly held that cleaning and maintenance services do not meet that test — the reported cases concern landscaping, pool upkeep and common-area cleaning rather than mechanical plant, but the reasoning is about maintenance as a category. So an unpaid maintenance invoice is a weaker instrument than a contractor may imply, while capital work under the same agreement may well be lienable. Keep the two on separate documents with separate payment terms, and collect lien releases on the capital side.
Questions
Questions buyers ask before signing
Does a full-coverage agreement include compressors?
Often not, and that is the first thing to check. The compressor is the most expensive component, so it is the one most frequently excluded, capped, or made conditional on a prior condition report. A full-coverage agreement that excludes compressors is a labour agreement with a better name.
Who pays for refrigerant under a maintenance agreement?
The owner, at every tier, because the supply market is in a phasedown and no contractor will price a year ahead of a commodity it does not control. What you negotiate is not whether you pay but how: a rate per pound by refrigerant type, an annual or per-unit cap, and a stated position on leak search and repair labour.
How long should a commercial HVAC service agreement run?
One year is normal, and a one-year term with a termination-for-convenience clause costs little to be wrong about. Longer terms are worth signing only for something specific — a capped escalation, a held rate card, a better response commitment.
Is a four-hour response-time guarantee worth anything?
Only if a remedy is attached. A response time with no stated consequence for missing it is an aspiration, and should be priced as though absent. Ask what happens in the fifth hour: a credit, a waived call-out, an escalation to a named person.
Division I · Commercial
How Amalfi Mechanical writes this
The guide above is not a sales document — a reader who takes it to a competitor and negotiates a better agreement has still been served. What we will say about our own practice is narrow and checkable: the equipment schedule comes first and comes from a survey, not an estimate; visit frequency is a number; refrigerant is excluded from every fixed-price tier and priced by type; and the reports, photographs and readings are yours.
Amalfi Mechanical holds commercial air conditioning, refrigeration, plumbing and electrical on one agreement, mostly in Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Boca Raton and West Palm Beach. Response targets county by county are on the coverage page.
Enquiries
Bring us the agreement you have
Send the document you are being asked to sign, whoever wrote it, and we will mark up the scope grid and the exclusions against your equipment list. It obliges you to nothing.