What should a boiler technician job description include? (free template)

Duties and responsibilities.

Put the description in writing before the posting goes up.

The ADA treats the fundamental duties of a job as its essential functions, and a written description prepared before you advertise or interview is evidence of what is essential — a function can be essential because the position exists to perform it, because few employees are available to share it, or because it is highly specialised.

For a boiler technician that written list is also your screening rubric: it is what you quiz candidates against and what you grade the first season on.

Copy the trade list that matches your accounts, then narrow it to your jobs.

A service-side list centers on the seasonal tune-up: combustion analysis — reading how a burner fires and adjusting the fuel-and-air mix — plus cleaning, safety and operating-control checks, and the documentation your tickets run on.

Around it, name what your techs actually touch: no-heat emergency calls through the heating season; circulator pumps, zone valves and expansion tanks on hot-water systems; air vents, steam traps and condensate returns on steam ones; gas-fired versus oil-fired burners; leak and control repairs; and full boiler replacements if you install.

Say which split of the trade you are hiring, because "boiler technician" does not tell a candidate what your job is.

State the setting (residential homes, apartment buildings, commercial or institutional facilities), whether the job is service and repair or includes replacement and installation, and the systems by name — steam, hot-water hydronic, gas or oil firing.

If residential boiler service is the line, say so plainly: EIA's 2020 Residential Energy Consumption Survey counts 9.29 million U.S. homes heated mainly by a steam or hot-water (boiler) system, and 6.01 million of them — 65% — are in the Northeast, so in boiler country the ad can own the tune-up-and-no-heat reality outright.

Hiring a helper instead of a tech is its own posting — put the level in the title.

The worker-side version of this question — what the job is like day to day — belongs to our boiler technician career guide; this page stays on the employer's side.

Physical demands, stated plainly.

Before a conditional job offer you may state the job's physical requirements — lifting a set weight or climbing ladders, for example — and ask whether the applicant can meet them.

Whether your jobs sit in basements, mechanical rooms, crawl spaces or rooftop plant spaces, write the demands they actually carry into the description: it tells candidates what the day costs their body and gives you compliant wording to screen on later.

Licence and certification requirements — worded exactly.

Do not write a generic "must hold a state license" line.

Boiler licensing is jurisdiction-specific: the programs our research verified are state or city ones, not a national licence, and they carry two different meanings — licences to operate a boiler and licences to install or service one — so a requirement that fits nowhere reads to a working tech as an employer who never checked their own market.

Name the jurisdiction, the licence name and the class or grade, and match the tier to the work you need done unsupervised.

The verified examples: Minnesota's Department of Labor and Industry licenses boiler engineers and operators for low- and high-pressure boilers, in grades running Special, 2nd class, 1st class and Chief, with 1, 3 and 5 years of boiler experience behind the three higher grades per the state's September 2023 table; New York City licenses Stationary and Portable High Pressure Boiler Operating Engineers; Oregon's Class 3 Service Mechanic covers boiler install and repair by non-welded methods, requiring 2,000 hours of experience and 24 continuing-education hours per renewal; and in Georgia, a Class II Conditioned Air Contractor is unrestricted as to project size and equipment type except boiler installation, which the state's Insurance and Safety Fire Commissioner licenses.

Our career-side guide to whether boiler technicians need a license walks through the state map we verified, and the employer playbook continues in our guide to how to hire a boiler technician.

Use the template's placeholder until you have looked up the exact licence name and class your jobs need, and if the right candidate may qualify after you hire them, say so: "or ability to obtain within [N] days" is an honest line.

Before an offer you may ask applicants about required licences and certifications and ask them to describe or demonstrate how they would do a task — collect licence numbers on the application so you can check each one in the issuing authority's public lookup, a step our guide to verifying a licence before you hire walks through.

Certifications get the same exact-wording treatment: for oil-fired work, the National Oilheat Research Alliance certifies technicians at three levels — Bronze, Silver and Gold — with published requirements you can check a claim against (Silver means at least three years of service experience plus a comprehensive exam; Gold means Silver, at least five years on oilheat systems and at least four Advanced Training modules), so word the line at the level you require.

And if your boiler tech also takes the cooling-side calls in your HVAC mix, refrigerant work brings EPA 608 with it: under 40 CFR 82.161, anyone who could reasonably be expected to violate the integrity of a refrigerant circuit while maintaining, servicing, repairing or disposing of appliances containing CFC/HCFC or non-exempt substitute refrigerants must pass an exam from an EPA-approved technician certification program — our guide to how to verify EPA 608 certification covers that check.

Verify before you post.

Boiler licensing is state and city law, and it changes.

Confirm the current requirements for your jobs with your state licensing agency — or the city or county building department where licensing is local — and treat this page as employer information, not legal advice.

Pay and pay-plan disclosure.

Post a real range — the low, the high, and how the plan works — because in a number of states the range is a legal requirement in the posting itself, not a nice-to-have.

Laws confirmed in our research (September 2026, from statute text or the state labor agency) to require pay disclosure in job postings include California (employers with 15 or more employees), Colorado, Washington State (15 or more), Illinois (15 or more), the District of Columbia, Maryland (for work performed at least partly in the state), New York (4 or more, for work performed at least partly in the state), Vermont (5 or more), Minnesota (30 or more in the state), Massachusetts (25 or more in the state, since October 29, 2025), New Jersey (10 or more, over 20 calendar weeks), Maine (10 or more, since July 29, 2026) and Virginia (since July 1, 2026).

Delaware's law is signed but not in force until September 2027, and it will not apply to employers with 25 or fewer employees.

Connecticut and Rhode Island do not require the range in the posting; each requires giving the applicant the wage range — in Connecticut on request or by the time of an offer, whichever comes first, and in Rhode Island on request and before pay is discussed.

Our research did not confirm the posting requirement reported for Hawaii, and city ordinances were outside this check; our research produced no closed national list, so verify each state — and each city — where the job is located or where applicants will work.

The state-by-state detail lives in our guide to pay transparency laws by state.

Several of these laws reach past the number, so build the posting accordingly.

Colorado requires a benefits description and how and when to apply in every posting; Washington and Minnesota require a general description of benefits; Illinois accepts a hyperlink to a public page carrying the pay scale and benefits; Washington, D.C. requires the minimum and maximum projected pay in every listing and disclosure of healthcare benefits before the first interview.

If the job is paid on commission, say so in the posting — New York's labor department requires it — while Vermont goes the other way: an ad for a commission-based job need only disclose that fact and may skip the range.

Name the pay plan itself — hourly, flat rate, commission, salary, or a mix — and settle the overtime math before the posting, not after.

The federal Fair Labor Standards Act follows the pay, not the label: a flat-rate tech is still owed overtime — the regular rate is total job pay divided by hours actually worked, plus half-time for each hour over 40 in the workweek; commissions — including on equipment sales or service tickets — count in the regular rate; a bonus or spiff schedule announced in advance is a promised, non-discretionary bonus no matter what you call it; and the commission overtime exemption that can fit commission-heavy plans, section 7(i), applies only in a retail or service establishment, only when the regular rate exceeds 1.5 times the minimum wage and more than half of pay is commissions — whether a shop like yours qualifies is decided case by case.

Anchor the range to the market, then check it against your metro.

BLS publishes no boiler-technician-only wage — its OEWS program reports occupation-level series for the trades, not splits by specialty — so the federal benchmark for this role is SOC 49-9021, Heating, Air Conditioning, and Refrigeration Mechanics and Installers, the broader heating-and-cooling occupation this site measures boiler technicians against.

Within that SOC, the median wage was $61,010 a year ($29.33 an hour) in May 2025, with the middle half earning between $48,360 and $77,060 — and those figures exclude overtime pay, so a tech carrying a heavy winter no-heat load can earn above them.

State-by-state numbers sit on our boiler technician salary page — use them rather than a competitor's ad.

Schedule, on-call, truck and tools.

State each of these instead of letting the new hire discover them in January.

Schedule: give the working days and hours and the honest shape of the year — BLS describes most HVAC technicians as working full time, with schedules that can include evenings or weekends, on-call time for emergencies, and overtime or irregular schedules during peak heating and cooling seasons.

For a heating-heavy shop, that peak is the fall tune-up stack and the coldest weeks of no-heat calls, so if your winters run six-day weeks, write it here.

On-call: say whether there is a rotation, how often it lands on one tech, and how after-hours call-outs are paid — with that pay treatment in the pay section, not nowhere.

Truck and tools: say whether the shop provides a vehicle — and whether it goes home — or whether the tech meets at the shop.

Say what the company supplies — the combustion analyzer and specialty test equipment, the install tooling and consumables — and what the tech is expected to bring, such as hand tools.

If you fund certification exams, continuing-education hours or licence renewals, name it in the posting — where the credential renews on CE hours, as Oregon's Class 3 Service Mechanic and NORA's Silver and Gold levels do, that line recruits.

Each of the problems below lives in the copy, and each is yours to fix before you publish.

No pay range.

Where one of the posting laws above covers your shop, a posting without a range is a legal exposure — not a stylistic choice.

A licence line that fits nowhere.

A generic "state boiler licence required" tells a working tech you have not checked your own market — the programs our research verified are state or city ones, they differ on whether they license operating a boiler or installing and servicing one, and licensing can be local.

Name the jurisdiction, the licence and the class or grade, or state plainly that you will help the right candidate obtain it.

Operator wording on a service job.

If the ad reads like a plant-operator posting, you will pull stationary-engineer candidates, not dispatched service techs.

Describe a truck, an account list and a rotation between buildings, and the right candidates recognise themselves.

Age-coded wording.

Terms like "young", "recent college graduate", "boy" or "girl" violate age-discrimination rules unless a statutory exception applies, and help-wanted ads may not show a preference for, or discourage, applicants based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age 40 or older, disability or genetic information.

Describe the work, not the person you picture doing it.

Questions the posting cannot ask.

Stating the physical demands and asking whether the applicant can meet them is allowed.

Asking about past job injuries or workers' compensation history before an offer is not — keep those questions out of the posting, the application form and the phone screen.

Referral-only hiring.

Recruiting mainly by word of mouth through a mostly one-group workforce can itself be discriminatory if almost all hires come from that group.

Post the job publicly.

Small-shop assumptions.

Federal EEO laws cover private employers with 15 or more employees and the age law those with 20 or more, but state laws often cover smaller shops, so check yours.

Federal contractors must include the equal-consideration tagline in job ads; many other employers add an equal-opportunity line voluntarily.

Screening rules you have not checked.

Background-check, ban-the-box and paid-sick-leave rules are set by states and cities and were not verified state by state in our research — confirm the rules where you hire before you screen.

Eligibility verification, before the first day.

While applications come in, check whether your state mandates E-Verify.

Florida (private employers with 25 or more employees, since July 1, 2023) and North Carolina (25 or more in the state) require it for new hires; South Carolina requires every private employer to verify every new employee within three business days; and Arizona, Alabama and Mississippi require every employer to use it.

The thresholds reported for Georgia, Tennessee and Utah were not verified in our research, so check your state's current rule directly.

Federal contractors covered by the FAR E-Verify clause must enroll within 30 days of contract award.

With the copy fixed, put the posting where boiler techs actually look: browse current boiler technician jobs to see the board as candidates see it.

Before you publish, run the wording past our guide to how to write a job ad for HVAC technicians, and when the replies come in, prepare your interview questions before the first phone screen — how to hire a boiler technician picks up the rest: sourcing, screening, pay and the first season.

This page is employer career information, not legal advice. Confirm licence requirements with the issuing authority — the state, or the city and county where licensing is local — pay-posting rules with each state labor department, and employment-law questions with an employment attorney.