Best HVAC franchises compared on real Item 19 data: Aire Serv $944,801 median on 172 units, One Hour $884,016 on 364 territories, plus fee traps.
Quick answer Two HVAC franchises disclose usable earnings data. Aire Serv reports a $944,801 median across 172 reporting businesses on a $113,808 to $271,708 investment. One Hour Heating & Air Conditioning reports $884,016 across 364 territories on $143,273 to $286,702. Every other HVAC franchisor in our database discloses almost nothing.
Search our FDD database for a heating and air conditioning franchise and five franchisors come back. Two publish an Item 19 you can work with: Aire Serv, with 172 reporting businesses, and One Hour Heating & Air Conditioning, with 364 reporting territories. Of the other three, one has six locations open and an earnings table resting on a single unit, one had no units open at all when it filed, and one makes no financial performance representation.
So this is not a top ten list. It is two systems, owned by two competing home-services portfolios, and a long tail of franchisors asking you to take the trade on faith. Aire Serv belongs to Neighborly, alongside Mr. Electric and Mr. Rooter. One Hour belongs to Authority Brands, alongside Mister Sparky and Benjamin Franklin Plumbing. Those sibling brands matter, because they file nearly identical documents and they show you what the same franchisor does with a different trade.
| Brand | Parent | Item 7 range | Base initial fee | Item 19 sample | Disclosed median |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aire Serv | Neighborly | $113,808 to $271,708 | $45,000 | 172 businesses | $944,801 |
| One Hour Heating & Air Conditioning | Authority Brands | $143,273 to $286,702 | $43,000 | 364 territories | $884,016 |
| Mr. Electric | Neighborly | $159,500 to $357,425 | $42,500 | 169 businesses, four bands | no system-wide figure |
| Mister Sparky | Authority Brands | $133,273 to $276,702 | $33,000 | 185 territories | $455,253 |
Aire Serv had 229 businesses open on December 31, 2025, all franchised, none company owned. Its Item 19 covers the 172 that were open and reporting for the full year. The excluded units are itemized: 45 that opened during or after January 2025, 11 that went through a transfer, one that reported nothing, and 24 that closed during the reporting period. A franchisor that prints its closure count inside Item 19 is telling you something about how it expects to be read.
The median gross sales figure is $944,801. The average is $1,561,361, and 57 of the 172 businesses (33%) reached it. Whenever an average sits 65% above the median, a handful of large operators are carrying it, and the quartile table confirms that: the top 10% posted a $4,150,679 median across 17 businesses, while the bottom quartile’s median was $143,401 across 43. The reported high was $22,253,990. The reported low was $315.
That bottom number is not a typo in our extraction. It is in the filing. Someone held an Aire Serv franchise for a full calendar year and booked $315 in gross sales.
Aggregator listings, and our own database field, show One Hour Heating & Air Conditioning with a $0 initial franchise fee. It is wrong, and the way it went wrong is instructive.
The 2026 FDD sets the base Franchise Fee at $43,000, plus $0.43 for each person above 100,000 in your territory. The 2025 filing said the same thing, then added a sentence three lines down: during fiscal 2024 the franchisor collected fees “ranging from $0 to $62,741.” Automated extraction grabbed the low end of a range describing what discounted buyers actually paid and stored it as the list price. The 2026 document puts the fiscal 2025 collected range at $22,028 to $67,408, and that is the band to plan against.
Aire Serv has the same problem in reverse. Its $45,000 initial fee buys a territory of up to 100,000 population, and every additional 1,000 people costs $450. In 2025, the average initial fee an Aire Serv franchisee paid was $68,685, with a range of $39,325 to $115,379. The listed fee is a floor. If you want a metro territory, you are bidding against the census.
Both brands publish discount programs, for veterans, women and minority applicants, first responders, and existing franchisees converting an operating HVAC shop. Ask which one you qualify for before you assume the base number applies to you. If you are comparing entry prices across the trades, our breakdown of home service franchise costs puts these ranges next to plumbing, electrical, and restoration.
A $2,000 difference in initial fee is noise. The ongoing structures are not.
Aire Serv charges a license fee of 5% to 7% of gross sales, a 2% marketing fee, and local marketing group contributions capped at 3%. At a $944,801 median and the top of those bands, that is roughly $113,000 a year leaving the business. One Hour charges 6% of gross revenue or $1,500 a month, whichever is greater, plus a brand fund contribution of 1.5% on the first $5,000,000 that steps down to 1.25%, then 1%, then 0.75%, and reaches zero above $20,000,000.
Read that brand fund schedule again if you plan to build a multi-territory operation. One Hour has designed its marketing charge to decay as you scale; Aire Serv has not. The two systems look nearly identical at one truck and diverge sharply at ten. The minimum royalty cuts the other way: $1,500 a month is a floor One Hour charges whether you invoice anything or not, which matters in a first winter that runs mild. Neither structure is worse. They reward different plans, and the technology and software charges layered on top are worth reading closely too, as we covered in franchise technology fees.
Mr. Electric, Neighborly’s electrical brand, does something the HVAC brands do not: it splits Item 19 into four tables by territory population. Across 169 reporting businesses, the medians run $352,821 in territories up to 300,000 people, $1,022,586 from 300,001 to 500,000, $1,292,838 from 500,001 to 1,000,000, and $2,004,844 above a million. The four bands hold 87, 30, 32, and 20 units respectively.
Mr. Electric publishes no system-wide median at all. Any source quoting one for this brand has picked a band and dropped the label. The modal Mr. Electric franchisee is in the smallest band, where the median is $352,821, roughly a third of what a careless reading would suggest.
Mister Sparky, the Authority Brands equivalent, reports a $455,253 median across 185 territories held by 60 franchisees, with a high of $6,790,925 and a low of $14,460. Set that against One Hour’s $884,016 inside the same parent company, the same filing template, and a near-identical Item 7, and you have a clean read on trade mix: HVAC territories out-earn electrical territories by roughly 1.9x in that portfolio. Replacement equipment tickets are simply larger than service calls.
The territory structure also explains One Hour’s own quartiles. Its 364 territories are held by just 88 franchisees, an average of 4.1 each. The top quartile of those franchisees generated $125,556,539 across 41 territories, about $5.7 million per owner on 1.9 apiece. The bottom quartile generated $13,553,225 across 97, roughly $616,000 per owner on 4.4 apiece. More territory did not produce more revenue. It produced more thinly covered ground. Browse the full home services category if you want to see how that pattern repeats across trades.
Item 7 covers a vehicle, tools, initial inventory, training, and working capital. It does not cover the thing that actually gates your first permit, which is a mechanical license in your state’s name.
Most buyers here fall into two groups. Conversion candidates already run a licensed shop and are buying brand, call volume, and back office; One Hour runs a dedicated conversion incentive program aimed squarely at them. Everyone else is hiring a licensed lead technician into a business with no revenue history, in a labor market where that person already has offers. Aire Serv’s $315 outlier and One Hour’s 18 franchisees who ceased operations during fiscal 2025 are most likely staffing stories, not demand stories. The plumbing and roofing franchise categories run on the same constraint, which is also why the staffing franchise category exists as a business in its own right.
With only two credible disclosures, the usual shortlist exercise does not apply. The work shifts to validation calls and to the questions Item 19 leaves open.
Neither franchisor discloses unit-level costs, so the labor and materials percentage behind those medians has to come from you asking for it. Aire Serv should be able to say what happened to the 24 businesses that closed during 2025 and the 11 that transferred. One Hour should be able to say how many of its 18 departing franchisees held a single territory. The most useful question goes to both: how many of your strongest units were conversions of established shops? A system whose top quartile is mostly conversions has disclosed how well it acquires working businesses, which tells you very little about a startup. The parallel questions for the plumbing side are laid out in our Mr. Rooter and Roto-Rooter comparison.
Then model your own territory instead of the median. Run the Aire Serv fee stack and the One Hour minimum royalty against a realistic first-year revenue figure in our franchise investment calculator, using the bottom-quartile results. A $944,801 median describes a business that has been running for years in a territory someone else already chose.
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best HVAC franchisesHVAC franchise costAire ServOne Hour Heating & Air Conditioninghome services franchiseItem 19franchise fees
About this analysis The franchise data in this article is drawn from VetMyFranchise's structured analysis of 2,300+ Franchise Disclosure Documents filed with U.S. state regulators. See our data & methodology.
Between $113,808 and $286,702 for the two systems that disclose real data. Aire Serv's 2026 Item 7 runs $113,808 to $271,708 and One Hour Heating & Air Conditioning's runs $143,273 to $286,702. Both figures assume you already have or can lease a service vehicle and a small shop, and neither includes the working capital to cover payroll before receivables land.
You need a licensed technician on the payroll, which in most states means either you hold the license or you employ someone who does before you can pull a permit. State mechanical licensing is separate from your franchise agreement, and it is the constraint that decides your hiring order. Several of these systems recruit conversion candidates who already run a licensed shop precisely because the license problem is solved on day one.
The disclosures show revenue, not profit, and the spread inside each system is enormous. Aire Serv's 172 reporting businesses ranged from $315 to $22,253,990 in 2025 gross sales, and only 57 of them (33%) reached the system average of $1,561,361. One Hour's bottom quartile of franchisees averaged $616,056 in total revenue across an average of 4.4 territories each. Neither franchisor discloses unit-level costs.
One Hour discloses a larger sample (364 territories against 172 businesses) and breaks results into quartiles by franchisee. Aire Serv discloses a finer breakdown (top 10%, four quartiles, bottom 10%) and publishes its actual high and low, $22,253,990 and $315. Aire Serv also tells you how many franchisees closed during the reporting period. Both are above average for home services.
Both brands appear on the SBA Franchise Directory basis that lenders check, and the investment range fits standard 7(a) sizing. The practical constraint is that lenders underwrite your cash injection and collateral, not the brand. Bring the Item 19 quartile tables to the conversation rather than the headline median, because a lender modeling a bottom-quartile outcome will size the loan very differently.
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