October 2026: what an HVAC click costs now, and where the phone rings next

This is the first monthly dispatch from HVAC Bench. Your metro is first, then the national picture, then one practical read. Every figure is measured by a named search term or a named government series, and every one is on the site with its source.

What a click costs right now

Nationally, the average Google Ads click for "ac repair" is $46.46, on 368,000 searches a month. "Furnace repair" is $28.38 on 201,000. "Water heater installation" is $29.91, "ac installation" $25.43, "heat pump installation" $24.21, "air duct cleaning" $24.41 and "furnace replacement" $17.01. These are what advertisers pay Google per click, not what a booked job costs you. Your lead cost is the click cost times the clicks it takes you to get a lead; the calculator on any market page does that with your own numbers and will not guess them for you.

Metros vary far more than most owners expect. A furnace repair click is $53.87 in Chicago and $17.06 in New York. An AC repair click is $52.96 in Dallas, $34.07 in Houston, $32.80 in Chicago, $26.84 in Los Angeles and $9.26 in New York. If you buy clicks, the national figure is only a rough benchmark; the metro figure is the one to budget against. Every metro page shows its figure against the US average.

Where the phone rings next

Four years of monthly history, averaged by calendar month, says the same thing across the northern metros: "furnace repair" climbs through the autumn and peaks in January at roughly one and a half to two times a normal month, while "ac repair" has already fallen off its July peak and bottoms out in winter. "Water heater installation" peaks in October nationally and in 20 of the 46 metros we cover; in the rest the peak falls elsewhere in the year, so check yours. If you staff and advertise on the calendar rather than the phone, the switch from cooling to heating budget is now, not at the first frost. Each market page shows the profile for every job and says how much history it rests on and how far to trust it.

What technicians earn

The US median for HVAC mechanics and installers is $29.33 an hour (US Department of Labor, 2025 data). Seattle, Boston, San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Minneapolis all sit above $37. Tampa and Orlando sit under $25. Inside a single metro the 10th percentile runs from about $18 to $25 and the 90th from $36 to $62; in 28 of the 39 metros with wage data the 90th is above $40. That spread is the range you are actually hiring in.

Input costs

Producer prices from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, latest month August 2026: copper & brass mill shapes up 20.9% on the year (up 3.5% on the month), nonferrous metals up 33.0% on the year (up 1.1% on the month), steel mill products up 23.4% on the year (up 1.7% on the month), AC & refrigeration equipment up 4.1% on the year (up 0.3% on the month) and diesel fuel up 77.8% on the year (up 17.7% on the month). These are US national series.

These are year-on-year moves, and BLS marks the latest month preliminary. If your flat-rate book was last priced a year ago, the metal in it has moved.

The business side: turn the demand index into next month's ad budget

The seasonal index above is the most useful number on the site and the easiest to ignore. Here is how to use it, with real New York figures, in four steps that take ten minutes.

1. Find your baseline. Take what you spent on Google Ads in an average month this year. Say $3,000.

2. Scale it by the index for the coming month. In New York, "furnace repair" runs at 163 in January and 34 in April against an average month of 100. If furnace work is your winter, a $3,000 average month becomes roughly $4,900 in January and $1,000 in April. Spending the same $3,000 every month means you are outbid when the phone is ringing and paying for silence when it is not.

3. Check the click cost can carry it. A furnace repair click in New York is $17.06. At $4,900 that is about 290 clicks. If your history says one lead per six clicks and one job per three leads, that is about 16 jobs. If that number is not worth $4,900 to you, the budget is too high whatever the index says. The calculator on any market page does this arithmetic with your own close rate, and refuses to guess it.

4. Move the budget, not the total. The annual spend stays the same; it moves toward the months the index says the work is in. The hard part is cutting the quiet months, because a quiet month with less advertising feels like giving up. The index says the opposite: the calls were never there to buy.

Every number in this example is on the New York market page. Swap in your own metro's index and click cost from the block at the top of this email.

What is not here, and why

No job price ranges: we have no source for local job prices we could show you, so we do not print one. No Canadian wages or input costs yet: the Canadian pages show click cost and demand only, in US dollars, and say so. Where a click cost looked implausible or the provider returned none, the cell is blank rather than filled in. If a figure looks wrong for your market, reply to this email or use the feedback page and we will check it against the source.

Next dispatch: 1 November, with the same figures refreshed where the sources have moved.