List the equipment and the work, with the hours each piece takes to fit. Equipment carries your markup, labor is billed at your rate, and the two are added rather than multiplied. You get the bid and what it actually pays you per hour on site. Free, and no signup needed.
Equipment and work on this job
Markup, labor rate, overhead and profit
A margin is a share of the price, so it can never reach 100%: at 99% the bid would be a hundred times your cost. Capped at 80% here. If you meant a markup on cost, a 100% markup is a 50% margin.
Other costs (optional)
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These figures are estimates to help you bid a job. Adjust the equipment prices to your own distributor and the hours to your own crew, and remember that access, an attic in August and a long line set all cost time that the equipment price knows nothing about.
It is a free tool that prices an HVAC job the way the job is actually built: a piece of equipment, plus the hours to fit it. You list what is going in, with what it costs you at the distributor and how long one takes to install. The tool marks up the equipment, bills the hours at your rate, adds permits, refrigerant, a lift or haul-away, then applies overhead and profit. It ends on the total hours and what the bid pays you per hour, which is the number that tells you whether the install is worth the day.
Add one row per piece of equipment or task and set the quantity. Each item starts with a typical distributor price and a typical install time, and you should change both: your supplier price this week and your own crew's times beat any average. Set the markup you put on equipment and your labor rate. Tick the permit, the refrigerant and line set, a crane or rooftop lift, and hauling the old unit away. Finally set your overhead and profit margin. Everything updates as you type, and nothing is sent anywhere.
An install and a service call are two different sums, and most companies run both. An install is equipment plus the hours to fit it: the condenser, the coil, the furnace, the line set, and a day or two of a crew's time. A service call is a diagnostic fee plus hours plus whatever part failed, and the part is often a $60 capacitor against an hour of someone's time. This calculator handles both, because both come down to the same two columns: what the kit costs you, and how long the work takes.
On top of that sit the things that are neither equipment nor hours. The permit and the inspection. Refrigerant and the line set. A crane for a rooftop unit, or an attic in August that turns a six hour install into eight. Hauling the old equipment away. Each is its own line here, because folding them into the equipment price is how a quote becomes impossible to defend when the homeowner has two others on the table. For more detail, see our guide on how to price HVAC jobs.
This is the habit that quietly decides which of your jobs make money. It is easy to price an install at two or two and a half times what the equipment cost you, because it is one number and it is roughly right on average. The trouble is that the equipment price knows nothing about the install.
A 95% furnace in a clean basement with the gas and the flue where you want them is a seven hour job on $2,600 of equipment. An 80% furnace in a crawlspace you have to crab through, with a flue to reline, is nine hours on $1,800. Price both at 2.2 times the equipment and you bid $5,720 for the easy one and $3,960 for the hard one. You have overcharged the first customer and bought yourself a loss on the second, and you will not see it until you look at the hours.
So this calculator keeps the two apart. The markup goes on the EQUIPMENT, which is where it belongs: it pays for sourcing, carrying, warranty and the money tied up. The hours are billed at your LABOR RATE, which is what pays the technician, the van and the overhead. The two are added, never multiplied. Then look at the last line, what the bid pays per hour, and compare it across jobs. That number is what tells you the crawlspace furnace needed a bigger quote.
And this one costs money on every trade, including this one. A 20% markup on a $1,000 cost gives a $1,200 bid, and your profit is $200 on $1,200, which is a 16.7% margin, not 20%. To actually keep 20% of the price you divide by 0.80 and bid $1,250. The calculator treats the profit field as a margin and divides, so the number you type is the share of the bid you keep. Overhead is applied to cost before that, because overhead is a cost, not a profit.
These are common starting points in the United States for residential work: roughly what the equipment costs a contractor at the distributor, and roughly how long one takes to fit. Treat them as a baseline and replace both with your own numbers, which is the single biggest improvement you can make to your estimating.
| Equipment or work | Cost to you, and install time |
|---|---|
| Capacitor or contactor | $60 and 1.0 h |
| Ductwork, per run | $120 and 2.0 h |
| Smart thermostat | $220 and 1.0 h |
| Evaporator coil only | $900 and 5.0 h |
| Air handler | $1,500 and 6.0 h |
| Gas furnace, 80% AFUE | $1,800 and 7.0 h |
| Mini-split, single zone | $1,800 and 8.0 h |
| AC condenser and coil, 3 ton | $2,600 and 8.0 h |
| Gas furnace, 95% AFUE | $2,600 and 9.0 h |
| Heat pump, 3 ton | $3,400 and 10.0 h |
| HVAC labor rate | $90 to $175 / h |
| Equipment markup | 25% to 50% |
| Permit | $100 to $400 |
Record the real hours on your next ten installs and replace the defaults with them, because the gap between a seven hour install and a ten hour one is most of your margin. Size the system from a load calculation rather than from whatever came out, since matching the old unit is how an oversized system gets sold and then short cycles for fifteen years. Quote the permit and the refrigerant as their own lines. Say in writing what happens if the existing ductwork turns out to be undersized or the electrical supply will not carry the new unit, because neither is visible on a walk-through. Put a date on the quote: equipment prices move, and they moved a lot. When the job is agreed, our free HVAC quote template and estimate and quote generator turn the same line items into a document you can send in seconds.
Once the estimate is accepted, invoice the job straight away and keep the payment terms short:
From our invoice data: Shorter terms bring the money in sooner: invoices due on receipt are paid in 15.9 days on average and Net 30 invoices in 47.2 days, while the share paid by the due date barely changes (39.1% against 42.3%).
Source: Billbooks invoice payment study, 53,095 paid invoices from 180 businesses, 2007 to August 2026. See the invoice payment study
This calculator prices a job. It does not size a system: that is a load calculation and it needs the building, not a spreadsheet. These figures are for planning only, and your final quote should reflect your own distributor prices, your own crew's times, local rates and what you find when you get there.
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