Home › Guides › Google Local Services Ads for HVAC: Season by Season
A plumber's Local Services Ads spend is roughly the same in April and August. Yours is not. Here is how the thing behaves for a heating and cooling shop, without the agency gloss.
If you have not run Local Services Ads before, the plumber guide on this site covers the parts that are the same for every trade: pay per call rather than per click, how the ad sits above the map, the October 1, 2026 rule that bills you for a missed call once the caller stays on the line 20 seconds, the automatic credits that replaced the dispute button in 2024, and the Pennsylvania paperwork. None of that is different for HVAC, and I am not going to repeat it. What is different is the calendar. A plumber's phone rings about the same in April as in August. Yours rings in the first week of real heat and the first week of real cold, and barely at all in the six weeks either side of them. Local Services Ads bills you per lead, so the thing you are managing is not a price. It is a budget that has to be right on the Tuesday the county hits 94 degrees.
Google sets the price per lead by job type and area and does not publish it, so the honest figures come from agencies that run a lot of accounts. The cleanest set I have found covers 409 HVAC accounts for the month of February 2026: about $51 a lead on average, with 44 percent of leads turning into a booked job. Work that through and a truck in a driveway costs about $116, against an average ticket in that same set of $2,110. For comparison the plumbing accounts in the same dataset ran $57 a lead and booked at the same rate. So HVAC leads are a touch cheaper than plumbing leads and the jobs are worth more, which sounds like the easiest decision you will make this year. Two cautions before you believe it. February is heating season. A no-heat call books at a rate that a "my upstairs is a little warm" call in May does not, and that one month is the best month in the year for the HVAC side of this number. The same accounts in October will book a smaller share of leads and the tickets will be smaller. And the $51 is an average across job types. Google prices an emergency repair lead and an installation lead above a maintenance lead, and a message lead, where the homeowner types instead of calls, has been reported at roughly half the price of a call since Google split the two in its reporting in 2025. Installs come in as messages more often than emergencies do. Your own account will show you the real spread inside a month; nobody else's average will.
When you set the account up Google gives you a list of job types for your trade and you switch each one on or off. The exact list depends on where you are, but around here it runs along the lines of air conditioning repair, air conditioning installation, furnace repair, furnace or heating installation, heat pump work, maintenance, and duct work, with a few more depending on the market. Every one you leave on is a kind of call you will be billed for, and since the 2024 change a call for a job type you do not do is no longer credited back. So the first pass is honest: if you do not do duct cleaning, that switch is off, no matter how many leads it would bring. The second pass is the one agencies skip. The switches are how you steer the account through the year. In the first week of June the air conditioning repair switch is the whole business and the furnace switches are noise. In the last week of October it is the reverse. A shop that leaves everything on all year is paying for furnace-install messages in July from people who are three months from deciding anything. The one switch I would think hardest about is maintenance, which gets its own section below, because it is the one that can quietly cost you money in the exact months you need it most.
Here is the part that is actually different for HVAC. Local Services Ads budgets used to be a weekly cap you set in the LSA dashboard. Since August 2026 Google has been moving LSA accounts into Google Ads, US home-services shops first, with a 14-day email notice before your account moves, and on the day it moves the weekly budget is divided by seven and becomes an average daily budget. "Average" is the word to watch. A Google Ads daily budget is not a ceiling; Google is allowed to spend up to double it on any single day, as long as the month lands under about 30.4 times the daily figure. For a plumber that evens out. For you it does exactly what you would expect it to do: the first day the temperature breaks 90, every household in Chester County with a struggling condenser searches at once, your $70-a-day budget spends $140 before dinner, and it does the same thing the next day, and the next, until the monthly cap catches it, which might be the third week of the month, right when the heat is still on and you have no budget left. The cold-snap version is the same thing in January. Two ways to handle it. The simple one is to set the budget for the month you are in, not the year: raise it before the heat and before the first freeze, and pull it down in the shoulder weeks when nobody is searching anyway, which is also when Google cannot spend it. The better one is to size the budget to your trucks. Ten leads a day in a heat wave are no good to a two-truck shop that can run six calls, and a lead you cannot get to is a lead you still paid for. Set the cap where your crew tops out, and let the competitors with bigger budgets pay for the calls you would have missed. One more thing to do before your account moves: export your lead and performance reports out of the old LSA dashboard. The lead contacts move over. The month-by-month performance history, by every account I have read about, does not.
Spring and fall, the only HVAC phone that rings is the maintenance phone, and a tune-up around here is a $150 to $200 job. Put the February numbers on it: $51 a lead, 44 percent booked, $116 to put a truck in a driveway for a $150 tune-up. On the day, that is a loss once you pay the tech. So why would anyone leave the maintenance switch on? Because the tune-up is how you get into the house before the install conversation. The 15-year-old condenser you note on the maintenance ticket in April is the $8,000 replacement you quote in July, to a homeowner who already knows your name, instead of to a stranger who found four shops on his phone at 4pm on a Friday. Whether that is worth $116 a tune-up depends on your close rate on replacements and whether you actually follow up on what the tech writes down. If you do, the maintenance switch is the cheapest install lead you will ever buy. If the tickets go in a drawer, turn it off in the shoulder season and spend the money in July. What I would not do is pay for maintenance leads at full price and then sell them a plan that locks in the next two tune-ups for less, without having done that math first. And one practical thing: maintenance calls are the ones most likely to come in as messages, which cost less, and the ones most likely to be a plan member calling the number on your ad instead of the number on their contract. Give plan members a different number to call and you stop paying Google for your own customers.
This one is specific to HVAC shops because so many of them list 24-hour emergency service, and it got expensive on October 1, 2026. The new rule bills you for a missed call during your listed business hours when the caller stays on the line more than 20 seconds. Read that again with your hours field in mind. If your profile says open 24 hours, every hour is business hours, and the 11pm no-heat call that rang out while you were asleep is now a charged lead, with nothing booked against it, and the homeowner is on the phone with the next shop. A plumber who lists 8 to 5 has 15 hours a day where a missed call costs him nothing but the job. A shop that lists 24/7 has none. So there are exactly two honest setups. Either the hours say when a person actually picks up, and the ad stops running at night, or the hours say 24 hours and something answers at 2am that can tell a dead thermostat from a dead furnace and book the one that needs a truck. Listing 24 hours and letting it ring to voicemail is the one combination that now costs money on every single call. It also hurts you on the ranking side, because Google routes LSA calls through its own tracking numbers, so it knows which ones you did not pick up, and a string of them in a cold week pushes you down the list on the exact nights you want to be at the top of it.
A small thing that will save you an argument. Most of what is written about Local Services Ads still calls the check mark "Google Guaranteed" and talks about the money-back guarantee behind it. On October 20, 2025 Google folded Google Guaranteed, Google Screened and License Verified into one badge called Google Verified, and the guarantee, where a customer unhappy with the work could claim a refund from Google, ended with it. The verification behind the badge did not change: the owner and every tech who goes into a home passes the background check, which Google pays for; you show general liability insurance; and you show whatever license your state or township requires. Pennsylvania has no statewide HVAC license, the same as plumbing, so for most shops around here that is the PA Home Improvement Contractor registration with the Attorney General, plus your township's card if it issues one. Your EPA Section 608 card is a separate thing: federal law requires it for anyone buying or handling refrigerant, Google is not the one checking it, and you need it regardless. Have the HIC number, the insurance certificate and any local license scanned before you start the application, because verification is a couple of weeks and every missing document adds one, and if you apply in May you want to be live before the heat, not after it.
Apply in the shoulder season so you are verified before the first heat wave, not during it. Switch on only the jobs you run, and revisit the switches when the season turns. Set the budget to what your trucks can take in a bad week, and raise it before the weather, not after. Make the maintenance decision on purpose, with your replacement close rate in front of you. And fix the hours field before the ad goes live, because since October a 24-hour listing that rings to voicemail is a bill. If you would rather not be the one reading the charged leads every week and turning switches with the forecast, that is the Lead Engine: $147 a month with a $497 setup, or $297 setup at the founding rate for the first five shops. The lead spend goes to Google, not to me. And if the hours problem is the thing that worries you, the receptionist is what answers the LSA line on the first cold night, runs the thermostat-batteries and furnace-switch questions, and books the one that needs a truck, so the call you are paying for turns into a job instead of a line on the bill.
Google sets it by job type and area and does not publish it. Across 409 HVAC accounts in February 2026 one agency reported about $51 a lead on average, with 44 percent of leads booking, which is about $116 per booked job against a $2,110 average ticket. February is heating season, so treat that as the good month; your shoulder-season numbers will be worse.
Yes, before the heat, not during it, and only up to what your trucks can run. Under the Google Ads daily budget, Google can spend double your daily figure on a hot day, so a budget set in April gets spent fast in the first heat wave. Set it for the month you are in and pull it back in the shoulder weeks when nobody is searching anyway.
Not on the day: at roughly $116 per booked job, a $150 tune-up loses money once the tech is paid. They are worth it if the tune-up reliably turns into the replacement quote later and you follow up on what the tech writes down. If those tickets go in a drawer, switch maintenance off in the shoulder season.
Since October 1, 2026, a missed call during your listed business hours where the caller stays on more than 20 seconds is billed as a lead. If your profile says open 24 hours, that is every hour, including the 2am no-heat call that rang out. Either list the hours someone actually answers or have something answer all night.
No. On October 20, 2025 Google replaced Google Guaranteed, Google Screened and License Verified with a single Google Verified badge, and the money-back guarantee ended with it. The background check, insurance and license verification behind the badge are the same.
It is moving. Since August 2026 Google has been migrating US home-services accounts, HVAC included, into Google Ads as a pay-per-lead campaign, with a 14-day email notice. Your weekly budget becomes a daily average, divided by seven, and you should export your performance reports from the old dashboard before the move because they do not come across.
Google asks for the license your state or municipality requires, your general liability insurance, and a background check. The EPA Section 608 card is a federal requirement for handling refrigerant and is separate from the application; you need it either way. Pennsylvania has no statewide HVAC license, so have your PA Home Improvement Contractor number and any township license ready.
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