What should an HVAC controls (BAS) 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 controls seat that written list is also your screening rubric: it is what you test candidates against and what you grade the first commissioning season on.

Name the automation layer explicitly, because "controls technician" alone does not tell a candidate which seat you mean.

The rated core tasks give you the vocabulary: O*NET's sample job titles for HVACR mechanics and installers (SOC 49-9021) include HVAC Control Tech, and for that occupation O*NET rates laying out and connecting control wiring from wiring diagrams (81) and repairing or replacing defective equipment, components or wiring (81) among the top-rated core tasks, with testing electrical circuits or components for continuity with electrical test equipment rated higher still (83).

BLS's duty list adds installing electrical components and wiring, inspecting and testing systems, and keeping records — on a controls job the record is the deliverable, so write documentation into the duties, not the fine print.

Then the parts only your shop knows.

The systems the hire works: [commercial office buildings, schools, retail, data halls / residential and light-commercial].

Whether the seat is service and repair on living buildings or the controls scope of new installation — BLS says some technicians specialize in installation while others repair and maintain systems, and the two seats reward different skills.

Name the network if your buildings run one: BACnet is ASHRAE Standard 135, a data communication protocol for building automation and control networks, designed for applications such as HVAC control, fire and life-safety systems, security and energy management — a candidate who can talk about that network and one who can only talk about compressors are different hires.

And write the customer-facing duty in: O*NET rates discussing heating or cooling system malfunctions with users to isolate problems as its highest-importance core task for HVACR mechanics (importance 85), and on a controls job the listener you care about is the customer's facility manager — clarity there is what renews the service agreement.

State the level in the title — technician, senior, or a trainee seat you will staff and pay differently — and say which split of the trade you are hiring.

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

Licence and certification requirements — worded exactly.

Do not write a generic "must hold a state license" line — it is the classic job-description trap our licence research flags: many states license the trade at the contractor level rather than the technician level, licence names differ by state, and for controls work the requirement can be an electrical or low-voltage classification rather than an HVAC one.

A requirement that fits nowhere reads to a working tech as an employer who never checked their own market.

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

Split the seat in two before you word anything, because the law does.

The refrigerant side is federal: under 40 CFR 82.161, any person 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 (e.g., HFCs) must pass an exam from an EPA-approved technician certification program.

A controls tech who only mounts controllers, lands low-voltage wiring and programs sequences does not, on that description, meet the rule's trigger — but the trigger is what the work could do to a circuit, so read the actual job scope, not the title.

Where the seat does touch equipment, word the type: Type II covers medium-, high- and very-high-pressure appliances (small appliances and MVAC or MVAC-like equipment excepted), Type III covers low-pressure appliances such as chillers using R-11, R-123, R-113 or R-245fa, and Universal covers all the appliance types described for Types I, II and III.

Word the requirement the way the credential behaves: EPA 608 does not expire, so don't paste a renewal-date line onto it — and EPA does not issue the cards, the certifying organizations do, so "EPA card" wording sends your verification to the wrong place.

Above that federal floor, the wiring side is state and local law.

The states our research confirmed write it as an electrical classification: Washington's limited energy electrical specialty (06) covers low-voltage work including HVAC/refrigeration low-voltage wiring and energy management and control systems, and the state's separate HVAC/refrigeration (06A) electrical specialty is not limited by voltage, covering Class 2 low-voltage HVAC control wiring and line-voltage components inside HVAC/R equipment; Oregon licenses Limited Energy Technicians — Class A (LEA) for all limited energy systems and Class B (LEB) for limited energy work excluding protective signaling; LEB can be qualified through 4,000 hours of equivalent experience plus a 32-hour course.

What your state — or, where licensing is local, your city or county — requires for controls wiring, and whether it is your company's licence or the technician's, is set by your state electrical board or licensing agency: confirm it there before the requirement goes in a posting.

If the right candidate can qualify after you hire them, say so in the line: "or ability to obtain within [N] days" is an honest placeholder, and it keeps the posting open to a strong mechanical tech you are willing to train into controls.

Vendor credentials get the same exact-wording discipline.

One platform credential with a verified name: Tridium's entry credential course is the Niagara 4 Technical Certification Program (TCP), a hands-on course for field service personnel to design, engineer and program projects on the Niagara 4 framework — word the line at that name, and screen claims by asking for the certificate.

Johnson Controls' Training Institute sells customer courses that award continuing-education credits; those are courses, not a certification, so a posting line reading "Metasys certification required" demands a credential our research did not find.

Keep the hierarchy straight for the reader of your posting: EPA 608 is the legal requirement where the refrigerant side is in scope, the state licence, where one applies, is the legal permission to do the wiring, and a vendor credential is neither — it is a hiring signal, which is why you ask for the certificate itself rather than taking the acronym on faith.

Put verification in your process, not just the posting: 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, so collect licence numbers on the application and check each one in the issuing authority's public lookup — the steps our guides to verifying a licence before you hire and verifying EPA 608 certification walk through.

The employer playbook continues in our guide to how to hire an HVAC controls (BAS) technician.

Verify before you post.

Licensing for controls work sits with your state electrical board or licensing agency — or the city and county where licensing is local — and refrigerant-certification rules with the U.S. EPA.

Rules change; confirm the current requirements for your jobs with the issuing body, 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 (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 unless a specific exemption applies — the regular rate is total job pay divided by hours actually worked, plus half-time for each hour over 40 in the workweek; commissions count in the regular rate; 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 over a representative period (at least a month) is commissions — whether a shop like yours qualifies has been decided case by case since the DOL withdrew its old list of non-retail businesses in May 2020.

Price the plan with your bookkeeper and employment attorney before you promise a split.

Anchor the range to the market before you check it against your metro.

Our research has no controls-specific BLS wage to quote: BLS publishes occupation-level series, and the HVAC Control Tech title sits inside SOC 49-9021, Heating, Air Conditioning, and Refrigeration Mechanics and Installers — the broader heating-and-cooling occupation this site measures controls technicians against.

Within that occupation, the median wage was $29.33 an hour, $61,010 a year, in May 2025, with the middle half earning between $23.25 and $37.05 an hour.

Those figures exclude overtime pay, shift differentials and non-production bonuses while including commissions and production bonuses — so a tech who works overtime can earn above them.

There is no BLS starting-pay statistic; the closest proxies for an entry-level offer are the 10th percentile ($19.25 an hour, $40,050 a year) and the 25th — and percentiles reflect all workers in the occupation, not only new hires.

And know who else bids for the skill set: in the May 2025 data the median at plumbing, heating and air-conditioning contractors was $60,030, while wholesale trade paid $71,190 for the same occupation — your hire's outside options are not only other contractors.

National percentiles for the occupation are on our HVAC controls technician salary page — use them rather than a competitor's ad.

Schedule, on-call, truck and tools.

State each instead of letting the new hire discover it during the first heat wave.

Schedule: give the working days and hours and the honest shape of the year — BLS says most technicians in this occupation work full time, schedules may include evenings or weekends, they may be on call for emergencies, and they sometimes work overtime or irregular schedules during peak heating and cooling seasons.

A building whose automation is down does not wait for Monday; if your summers 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 meter and controls test equipment, the company laptop and the front-end software the seat runs on — and what the tech is expected to bring, such as hand tools.

If you fund certification exams, vendor courses or licence renewals, name it in the posting — for a controls seat, paid platform training is part of the offer.

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 HVAC licence required" tells a working tech you have not checked your own market: licence names and classes differ by state, and for controls wiring the requirement can be an electrical or low-voltage classification.

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

Credential wording by acronym.

"Niagara certified" and "Metasys certification required" are not lines a candidate can check against a program: the verified program name is Tridium's Niagara 4 Technical Certification Program, and the Johnson Controls catalog we checked sells courses that award continuing-education credits — courses, not a certification.

Ask for the certificate, and word the line at the program name.

A mechanical ad for a controls seat (or the reverse).

An ad full of compressors, charge and airflow will not reach the tech you need if the seat is networks, sequences and point-to-point checkout — and an automation-only ad will not reach the strong mechanical hire you plan to train into the front end.

Describe the split you are actually hiring.

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 — lifting a set weight, climbing ladders, work in mechanical rooms and ceiling spaces — 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 controls techs actually look: browse current HVAC controls 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 prepare your interview questions before the first phone screen — how to hire an HVAC controls (BAS) technician picks up the rest: sourcing, screening, pay and the first 90 days.

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 — refrigerant-certification rules with the U.S. EPA, pay-posting rules with each state labor department, and employment-law questions with an employment attorney.