Maintenance agreements and recurring work

You cleaned a burner assembly in February, the homeowner paid $340, and you have not heard from her since. That system needs the same attention next winter, and whether she calls you or the first name in the search results depends on what she remembers in eleven months.

A maintenance agreement replaces that memory with a scheduled visit and a price you both already agreed to.

What the customer is actually buying

Homeowners say "maintenance agreement" and mean two different things. Which one you sell is the decision that matters.

Scheduled work. Two visits a year, a defined list of tasks, a member rate on repairs and first call on the schedule when the heat wave hits. That is a maintenance plan.

Coverage for failures. If the compressor dies, the plan pays for it. That is a service contract, and several states regulate those — registration and disclosure rules, sometimes through the insurance department. Texas shows how granular this gets rather than how simple: Occupations Code ch. 1304 generally treats a promise to repair or replace on failure as a regulated service contract, but carves out exceptions, including one for an agreement issued by the manufacturer or merchant that sold the covered equipment — which can reach an HVAC contractor who sold and installed the system being covered. TDLR itself flags these exceptions as a recurring source of confusion. Whether your state draws this line the same way, and whether an exception like Texas's applies to you, is a question for TDLR or a local attorney, not a guess.

Stay on the maintenance side if you can. It is simpler to price and carries no promise you cannot cost out in advance.

Price the plan from the visit, not from the competitor

Start with what one visit costs you to deliver. The numbers below are made up to show the math — swap in your own labor rate and tune-up cost, since both swing hard by trade and metro. An HVAC tune-up, twice a year:

Burdened labor is wage plus payroll taxes, workers' comp and benefits, not the wage on the paystub. For the vehicle line, use your own cost per mile: fuel, insurance, maintenance and depreciation over miles driven. That is a costing number, not the IRS standard mileage rate, which is a deduction rate for your tax return (72.5 cents through June 30 2026, 76 cents from July 1 — current rates).

Two visits a year is $232 of real cost before you have earned a dollar. At a 35% target margin that needs a price of $357 a year: $232 / (1 - 0.35). But two one-off visits at $189 come to $378, so a $357 plan is a 6% discount, and nobody signs for 6%.

That is the squeeze. At $299 the customer sees a real 21% saving and your margin on the visits falls to about 22%. That can still be right: the plan fills slow weeks you are paying a technician through anyway, and puts you in front of the equipment twice a year, which is where replacement work comes from.

What it must never do is drop below $232. Repair work later is a hope, not a line item, and a slow year for breakdowns turns your best customers into your most expensive ones.

Billing the same plan three different ways

Same $299 of annual work, three structures:

Prepaid is the strongest cash position and the hardest sell to someone who just handed you $340. Write the refund rule down — pro-rated, per unused visit, or none — because a few states set their own rules on refunding prepaid consumer services. Monthly costs more across the year, and it should: they can take the April visit and cancel in May.

What the agreement says in writing

One page covers it. Every line below exists because someone argued about it:

• Visits and windows — "one between March and May, one between September and November," not "twice yearly."
• The task list — itemized, per visit. This is the whole product.
• Excluded and billed separately — parts, refrigerant, oversize filters, after-hours calls, equipment not listed.
• Equipment covered — make, model and location. One furnace, not "the house."
• Member pricing — the discount as a percentage, and whether it covers parts, labor or both.
• Who schedules — you or them, and what happens if they skip a window.
• Transfer on sale — does the plan follow the house or end at closing.
• Renewal and cancellation — the term, whether it renews on its own, at what price, and how to get out.

That last line is the one most likely to get you a complaint. Several states regulate auto-renewing consumer contracts — how clearly you disclose the renewal, whether notice goes out before it renews, how easy cancelling has to be — and the triggers differ, with no national standard to build one document against. California is the strictest widely-cited example: its Automatic Renewal Law was amended by AB 2863 for contracts entered into, amended or extended on or after 1 July 2025 (Bus. & Prof. Code §§ 17600 ff.). Do not read it as the rule where you work.

No federal auto-renewal rule is in force right now: the FTC's "click-to-cancel" Negative Option Rule was vacated by the Eighth Circuit in July 2025, and rulemaking restarted in 2026. So have a local attorney read your renewal and cancellation language once, rather than copying a plan document you found online.

Offering it at the end of a job

The best moment is the one you are already standing in: the repair is done, the panel is open, and the customer can see what you were dealing with. Say what happens next year, then price it.

"This coil will need the same clean in about twelve months. I can put you on the maintenance plan — two visits, $299 a year, repairs 15% off. Or you call me and pay $189 a visit. Same work either way." Then stop talking.

Then say the renewal terms out loud before they sign.

Before you sign plans in living rooms. The FTC's Cooling-Off Rule gives a three-business-day right to cancel many sales made at the buyer's home above $25, and you have to hand over a written cancellation notice (16 CFR part 429). It excludes a repair visit the buyer asked for — but only that repair and the parts it uses. Additional services sold on the same visit fall back under the rule, and a maintenance plan sold at the end of a repair call is exactly that. Several states go further, so build the notice into your paperwork — more in the three-day right to cancel.

Keep the plan in your DoneQuote service catalog as a priced item, so the annual price, the visit count and the member discount go out exactly as you costed them.

Whether the plan is actually working

Renewal rate is how many plans due to renew actually did. Trade publications print renewal-rate averages, but they run on whatever the vendor self-reported, so don't anchor on them. Watch your own number instead, and watch which way it moves. A rate that slides year over year means the visits are not delivering something the customer values.

Revenue per member is the plan price plus every repair, part and replacement that member bought that year. That is what tells you whether the 22% margin was an investment or a slow leak.