HVAC Contractor License in Georgia: Requirements, Qualifier, Bond and Exams

Statewide.

Under the rewritten licensing law, no person shall engage in conditioned air contracting unless they hold a valid license issued by the division — conditioned air contracting is Georgia's term for HVAC contracting, and the license is an individual credential.

Georgia issues no technician-level HVAC license: the contractor license is the state credential a business builds on, by keeping a licensee regularly connected with it.

Whether any Georgia city adds its own contractor requirements was not part of our research, so check with the city where a job is permitted as well.

The Division of Conditioned Air Contractors of the State Construction Industry Licensing Board, under the Georgia Secretary of State, issues the license.

There are two classes.

Class I is restricted: it covers residential and light commercial air conditioning and heat pump systems of 60,000 BTU of cooling or less, and gas heating systems of 175,000 BTU or less.

Class II is unrestricted as to project size and equipment type, except boiler installation, which is licensed under the Office of the Commissioner of Insurance and Safety Fire.

The qualifier is a licensed Conditioned Air Contractor.

The statute requires a company doing conditioned air work to have a licensed conditioned air contractor regularly connected with it full-time, and each branch office must have its own licensed contractor stationed there.

For a Class I license, qualifying experience is 4 years in total: 2 years of residential installation as a lead mechanic, 1 year as a service technician and 1 year of residential supervisory experience, plus EPA 608 Type II certification and a board-approved heat loss/gain and duct design course.

Class II takes 5 years of full-time experience: 2 years commercial supervisory, 1 year as service technician or service supervisor, and 2 years installing as lead mechanic — at least 1 year of it commercial-only on systems over 175,000 BTU heating and 60,000 BTU cooling — plus EPA 608 Type II and Type III and the same design course.

Georgia credits up to 2 years for a technical college diploma in air conditioning technology or engineering, and up to 1 year for a vocational-technical certificate.

Board rules also bar a licensee from qualifying more than one business for business registration at a time.

The requirement the statute states is a board-approved examination passed with a minimum score of 70.

On the vendor: the board's testing vendor is PSI, and candidates are approved by the board first, then register with PSI — but our source for that is the plumbing division's FAQ, so confirm the conditioned air exam list with the Conditioned Air Contractors division before you schedule.

Our research lists no separate business-and-law exam for Georgia conditioned air contractors; the requirement we found is the board-approved examination itself.

Georgia has no mandatory state license bond for conditioned air contractors.

A licensee may optionally execute and deposit with the judge of the probate court in the county of their principal place of business a bond in the sum of $10,000 — and once that bond is deposited, counties and cities may not demand a separate code-compliance bond.

On insurance: statewide minimums for conditioned air contractors were not found in the statute or board rules we read, so ask the division what it currently requires before you apply.

Licenses and certificates issued under the chapter are valid for a period of 2 years and renew biennially, with a 31-day late renewal window.

Continuing education is a standing cost: board rules require a Conditioned Air Contractor to complete 4 hours of continuing education per year.

The exact fee amounts were not captured in our research — the Secretary of State publishes them on its GOALS fee schedule — so price the application from there and confirm with the division.

Not as an open door.

Georgia's divisions may grant a license by reciprocity to an applicant licensed in another state, but the statute sets conditions: the other state's requirements must be substantially equal to Georgia's, the applicant must have been principally engaged in the practice for not less than 2 years immediately preceding the application, and the other state must offer Georgia licensees the same privilege.

Our research did not confirm which states Georgia currently holds reciprocity agreements with, so ask the division before you count an out-of-state license toward anything.

Notify the division fast: when the licensee a company relies on leaves, the company must notify the appropriate division within 7 days of the severance of connection.

The statute sets that notice deadline rather than an explicit replacement deadline — the exception is a licensee's death, after which the company may keep working under the license for 90 days, with one further 90-day extension possible for good cause.

And because a licensee may not qualify more than one business at a time, you cannot line up someone who already qualifies another company.

Verify a candidate's license in the Secretary of State's licensee search, and recruit the next qualifier before the current one gives notice.

Georgia rewrote its construction licensing law — Title 43, Chapter 14 of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated — through SB 553, effective July 1, 2026.

Section numbers and some requirements changed, so a requirement quoted from a pre-2026 source may no longer match the statute.

When we read the board's rule chapters in September 2026, they had not yet been updated to match the 2026 statute.

Where an older page and this one disagree, confirm with the division which applies.