Home Projects · Startup costs
How much does HVAC replacement cost?
Estimate what replacing your furnace, air conditioner or whole system costs, using what US households actually paid. Then check whether a heat pump would really cut your heating bill, because at average energy prices it often does not.
Typical range $9,786 – $19,294
- Equipment and materials$4,592
- Labour, overhead and profit$8,504
- Work subcontracted out$1,039
- Federal tax credit (expired)$0
- Total$14,135
§ 02 The return
Costs are what US households told the Census they paid, restated in 2025 dollars. The survey records no scope, and its categories are 'added or replaced', so they cover every kind of job from a wall furnace swap to a first-time ducted system in a house that never had one. Your quote depends on tonnage, ductwork, fuel, access and your local market. Running costs use national average fuel prices; yours will differ, so put your own in.
Where the money goes
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A five-figure job. Get at least three quotes, ask for the AFUE or HSPF2 rating in writing, and price the heat pump and the gas furnace side by side using your own energy prices.
By the numbers
- Census (American Housing Survey, 2023): among households who hired a contractor, half of central-AC jobs cost less than $7,611 and half of built-in heating jobs cost less than $5,481. For the households who replaced both in the same year, the median was $14,135. Note that adding the first two medians gives $13,092, which is simply wrong: medians do not add.
- Census: one full system replacement in ten cost more than $30,446, and a quarter cost less than $9,786. The spread is enormous, which is why a single 'average HVAC cost' tells you almost nothing.
- Economic Census (2022): a plumbing, heating and AC firm pays its field staff $33.17 an hour and bills $102.62 an hour for labour and overhead. That is a measured 3.09x markup, not the 'about 2 to 3x' the internet repeats. Overhead, insurance, trucks and profit all live inside that gap, so a contractor is not pocketing the difference.
- IRS: the energy efficient home improvement credit (section 25C), worth up to $2,000 on a qualifying heat pump, was terminated by Public Law 119-21 for any property placed in service after December 31, 2025.
- BLS: at the US average of 18.98 cents per kWh and $1.67 per therm, delivering a million BTU of heat costs $17.58 with a 95% gas furnace and $23.47 with a typical new heat pump. Electric resistance heat costs $55.62, so a heat pump is a huge win against baseboards and a loss against modern gas.
- EPA: only Section 608 certified technicians may buy refrigerant for stationary air conditioning, and there is no homeowner exemption. That is why genuinely replacing your own central AC is not really a legal option, and why the survey's do-it-yourself figures skew towards heating swaps.
- Census: 70% of households paid for their HVAC job out of savings. Only 6.3% used contractor-arranged financing, and those jobs had a higher median ($7,436) than cash-paid ones ($6,197).
What is sourced, and what is ours. The cost is sourced: the Census American Housing Survey asks households what a completed job actually cost, so these are real outlays, not a model. To prove we are reading the survey correctly, our extraction reproduces Census's own published HVAC table to the dollar (median $5,500, mean $6,835, 12.8m jobs, $82.4bn of spending). One honest caveat on the $14,135: Census publishes heating and cooling jobs pooled, not a "full system" figure, so that number is their data and our cut of it, taking the households who hired a contractor for both in the same year and taking the median of each household's summed bill. It is a statistic, not an estimate, but Census does not print it. The split into equipment and labour is ours: the shares come from the 2022 Economic Census, which measures that 32.5% of a plumbing/heating/AC job's value is materials, but applying that trade average to your job is our step, and an equipment swap is probably a little more equipment-heavy than the average. The running-cost comparison is arithmetic on federal fuel prices, not a forecast. One thing we cannot do at all: the survey records one cost per job and no equipment detail, so there is no way to identify a heat pump in it, and no way to derive a price per ton. Anyone quoting you a national "cost per ton" made it up.
Sources: US Census Bureau, American Housing Survey 2023 (what households actually paid) · US Census Bureau, AHS 2023 PUF Estimates for User Verification (table C-16-OO, the HVAC row we reproduce: 12,803,000 projects, $5,500 median, $6,835 mean, $82.44bn total) · IRS Fact Sheet FS-2025-05, termination of section 25C under Public Law 119-21 · IRS, Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit (section 25C) · US Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census (the measured billed rate, NAICS 238220) · BLS, average price of electricity per kWh, US city average · BLS, average price of piped gas per therm, US city average · EPA, Section 608 refrigerant sales restriction · BEA, residential improvements price index (deflator)
How this estimate is calculated
- The headline cost is the Census American Housing Survey median for owner-occupied households who hired a contractor, restated in 2025 dollars using the BEA price index for residential improvements. Each job is deflated from the year it was actually completed, not the survey year.
- The survey's two categories are literally 'added or replaced central air conditioning' and 'added or replaced built-in heating equipment'. So a first-time installation is pooled in with a like-for-like swap, and adding central air to a house that has no ductwork is a much bigger job than changing out a condenser. There is no field that separates the two. That pushes the medians here somewhat above what a pure swap costs, and we would rather say so than quietly present these as replacement-only figures.
- The low and high figures are not a margin we invented. They are the real 25th and 75th percentiles of what households paid, so half of all jobs genuinely land inside that band.
- The full system figure of $14,135 comes from households that hired a contractor for both a central-AC job and a heating job completed in the same year. We sum each household's two costs and take the median of the sum. We do not add the two medians together, because medians are not additive and doing so would understate the job by about a thousand dollars.
- The regional adjustment is the Census regional median for HVAC jobs, divided by the national one. The index itself is measured, not a cost-of-living guess, but it is measured on heating and cooling jobs pooled together and we apply that single index to all three job types. That application is our step. Measured separately, the regional spread on an AC-only job is wider than the pooled index implies, but those regional sub-cuts carry standard errors of 8% and more, so the pooled index is the steadier number rather than the flattering one.
- The split into equipment, labour and subcontracting applies the 2022 Economic Census composition of a NAICS 238220 job (32.5% materials, 7.4% subcontracted, 60.2% labour, overhead and profit). Those shares are measured, but they are the average across all plumbing, heating and AC work, so treat the split as indicative. As a check: it implies about $4,600 of equipment inside a full system, while DOE's product catalogue prices a 3-ton central AC plus a gas furnace at about $5,500 in 2023 dollars, which is roughly $6,000 restated in the 2025 dollars used everywhere else here. Two independent methods landing within about a quarter of each other. The catalogue figure is the higher of the two, so treat our equipment line as a floor rather than a ceiling.
- Running cost is the price of delivering one million BTU of heat into the house, which needs no assumption about the size of your home. Gas uses AFUE; heat pumps use seasonal COP, which is HSPF2 divided by 3.412. It ignores the gas standing charge you would save by going all-electric, and it ignores the fact that a heat pump's efficiency falls in very cold weather (seasonal ratings already average that in).
- The annual heat requirement of 50 million BTU is our assumption and not a statistic. It is roughly a gas-heated home in a moderate climate. Your own gas bill will give you a far better number.
- No federal tax credit is applied, because none exists for equipment placed in service after December 31, 2025. State and utility rebates are separate, often still available, and vary too much to publish a number for. Check your own utility.