Build a flat-rate price the way the best HVAC shops do it. Enter your parts cost and markup, the task hours, and your fully loaded labor rate, then see the flat price to quote and the true margin behind it.
Ballpark only, not a quote. This builds a price from numbers you enter, with no built-in price book. Confirm your real loaded rate, parts cost, and book times from your own payroll and supplier pricing, and get 3 local bids before you commit a number to a customer.
Pure arithmetic on the numbers you enter. No HVAC price book or regional pricing is assumed. Use it to pressure-test a flat-rate task price, not as a substitute for your own costed price book.
Pricing HVAC work by the hour quietly punishes your best techs and confuses your customers. The shops that win on profit price the task, not the clock. A flat-rate price book sets one fixed price for each repair, built from four levers: the parts cost with a markup, the standard task time, your fully loaded labor rate, and the overhead and profit baked on top. This tool walks that same math so you can pressure-test any task price before it goes in your book. It ships with no prices of its own, every number comes from you.
Hourly billing ties your revenue to time on the truck. The faster a sharp tech works, the less you earn, and the customer has no idea what the bill will be until the job is done. Flat rate flips both problems. The homeowner approves a fixed price up front, so there are no surprises, and an efficient tech becomes a profit center instead of a discount. Hourly can still fit large, unpredictable retrofit projects where the scope is genuinely unknown, but for everyday residential service and repair, a flat-rate price book is the cleaner system for you and the customer.
Every line in a flat-rate book is built the same way:
Flat price = (parts cost × markup) + (task hours × loaded labor rate) + per-task overhead + profit
Plug a capacitor swap into it. Say the part costs you $15, you mark parts up 3.0x, the book time is 0.75 hr, and your loaded rate is $120/hr. Parts bill at $45, labor at $90, so before overhead and profit you are at $135. Add a modest per-task overhead and your target profit and you land on a clean flat number you can quote on sight, every time, no matter which tech runs the call.
The single biggest pricing mistake in HVAC is billing labor near the tech's wage. A billable hour costs you far more than what you hand the technician. On top of the base wage you carry payroll taxes, workers compensation, health and benefits, the service truck and fuel, tools, the phone and dispatch software, and the hours that are not billable at all, drive time, restocking, training, and callbacks. Stack all of that up and the fully loaded labor rate usually lands roughly 40 to 60 percent above the base wage. If you pay a tech $28 an hour and bill at $35, you are not making labor profit, you are losing money on every hour and praying parts markup covers it. Recover the loaded rate first, then add profit on top. (Run your own payroll and overhead numbers to find your real rate, these ranges are starting points to verify, not your figures.)
HVAC parts are typically priced with a markup multiplier, commonly in the 2.5x to 3.5x range, with small, hard-to-source, or emergency parts often at the higher end. The multiplier covers the real cost of stocking, sourcing, warranty, and the risk you carry on the part, not just the sticker. Watch the language though: markup is measured against your cost, margin against your price, and they are never equal. A 3.0x multiplier is a 200 percent markup, which is a 66.7 percent margin on that parts line ($30 profit on a $45 price built from a $15 part). Confuse the two and a price that feels healthy can be thinner than you think. The calculator above shows the resulting margin so you always see what the multiplier actually earns.
This is the decision that separates shops that grow from shops that spin. Service and repair calls carry heavy per-call overhead, dispatch, drive time, diagnostics, and the callback risk, spread across a small ticket, so they need a higher gross margin just to clear. Replacement and install jobs are large tickets where equipment is a big share of the cost, so they often run at a lower percentage margin but a much larger dollar profit. Pricing both from one blanket number means you either scare off replacement customers with a sky-high install margin or quietly lose money on service calls priced like installs. Set separate targets. Flip the job-type toggle in the tool to see how the recommended target shifts.
HVAC is not a trade you legally improvise. EPA Section 608 certification to handle refrigerant, your state HVAC or mechanical license, liability insurance, and proper permits for equipment changeouts are not optional, and they all cost money that has to live somewhere in your price. Flat-rate pricing is also where the conversation about refrigerant by the pound belongs, since R-410A and newer A2L blends like R-32 vary in cost and handling. Verify the current licensing, permit, and refrigerant rules for your jurisdiction, they change, and price them in rather than eating them. A price that ignores compliance is not cheaper, it is just unaccounted for.
A real flat-rate price book is normally a paid product. Profit Rhino, Coolfront, and the price-book modules inside ServiceTitan and Housecall Pro all charge a monthly fee, and they earn it by maintaining thousands of pre-built tasks. What they do not do is teach you the math behind a single task or let you sanity-check your own loaded rate and markup for free. This tool is deliberately the opposite, it does not hand you invented prices, it shows you exactly how a flat-rate number is assembled from your real costs so the book you build (or buy) actually holds margin.
The Pro version turns this math into a complete, costed price book, save your loaded rate and parts markups once, build repeatable tasks, and push them straight into branded estimates and invoices your techs can quote on the spot.
Get early access, book a free call →The calculator ships with no price book. Every dollar in the result comes from what you type: parts cost, the markup multiplier, the standard task hours, and your fully loaded labor rate. Parts bill at cost times the multiplier, labor at hours times the rate, and any trip fee or per-task overhead is added on to make your fully loaded cost basis. Your profit target goes on top. A flat dollar target is simply added. A percent target solves for the price at which profit equals that share of the final number, so 20 percent means 20 percent of the price you quote, not 20 percent tacked onto cost. You get the flat price, the effective margin, the profit on the task, and the build behind it.
Three figures in the tool are not yours. The 2.5x, 3.0x and 3.5x markup chips, the starting margin hints that change when you switch between service and install, and the 1.5x burden used to suggest a loaded rate from a technician wage are published contractor pricing rules of thumb, last reviewed in June 2026. Nothing is calculated from them unless you accept the number, and a rate estimated from a wage is labeled as estimated on screen.
What it cannot see matters more. It does not know your payroll, your supplier invoices, your book times, or your callback rate, and it makes no regional adjustment, so the same inputs return the same price in Orlando and in Boise. It cannot check whether the loaded rate you entered is genuinely loaded, which is the number most likely to be wrong, so build that rate from your own books first. More than 50 free tools are published at kellywm.com/tools, no email wall, and we build custom calculators for service businesses from $600.
No. There is not a single task price inside it. It is arithmetic on the parts cost, markup, hours, rate, fees and profit target you enter, which is why two shops can run the same repair through it and get different numbers. A maintained book of pre-costed tasks is a paid product. This shows how one line in one gets assembled.
Enter the wage, leave the loaded rate blank, and the tool suggests a rate at 1.5 times the wage, a common rule of thumb rather than your figure. The screen flags it as estimated. Replace it when you can, because payroll taxes, insurance, the truck, tools and non-billable hours vary by shop, and only your own books show the real number.