How much should you pay an HVAC service manager, and on what pay plan?

Start with the honest gap: BLS has no "HVAC service manager" title in its occupation list, so there is no service-manager wage to quote and no percentile table for one.

The defensible benchmark is the closest published category, named as the broader category it is: SOC 49-1011, First-Line Supervisors of Mechanics, Installers, and Repairers — working supervisors of techs and installers, counted across every industry.

The May 2025 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics release, published May 15, 2026, puts the national median for that category at $38.39 an hour, $79,860 a year, with a mean of $40.97 ($85,220) across 617,500 wage-and-salary jobs.

The middle half earn between $62,690 and $101,360 (25th to 75th percentile).

Within plumbing, heating and air-conditioning contractors (NAICS 238220) — the industry row closest to the seat — the category counts 31,350 jobs, with an $81,800 median, an $88,720 mean, a 10th percentile of $55,420 and a 90th of $128,500.

Anchor on the contractor-industry row; the national row spans all industries.

Where you hire moves the number.

The category's highest state medians in May 2025 were Alaska $98,110, Washington $94,420, Connecticut $94,050, California $93,660 and New Jersey $92,680 — all-industry figures for the supervisory category.

Your state's median and percentile band for the same category are on our HVAC service manager salary by state page; anchor the offer to your state's number, not the national one.

Read every figure with two cautions.

OEWS measures pay including commissions, production bonuses and incentive pay, but excluding overtime pay, shift differentials, non-production bonuses such as sign-on or holiday pay, and benefits — so the bonus layer you design below may sit partly outside the measured figure, and the number is not the whole package.

And annual figures assume a 2,080-hour work year, while an annual salary is denominated in the year regardless of hours — budget overtime and on-call time above the benchmark, not inside it.

There is no experience table behind this seat.

The research behind this page found no BLS starting-pay or years-of-service figure for supervisory work in the trades, and the percentile band above describes the whole category — so treat it as the shape of the market, not a ladder someone climbs by years served.

What the data does support is a three-step ladder inside one series: plumbing, heating and air-conditioning contractors, same May 2025 release, same industry cut.

HVAC mechanics and installers at these contractors: median $60,030 (297,290 jobs).

First-line supervisors of mechanics, installers and repairers: median $81,800 (31,350 jobs).

General and operations managers: median $105,740, with a 10th percentile of $57,570 and a 90th of $214,590 (40,250 jobs).

Those are three different BLS categories, not three rungs of one org chart — but they bracket the question you actually face when you write the offer: is the seat you are funding a working supervisor, or the manager of the whole operation?

If the seat you are funding owns install crews and the P&L, the adjacent BLS category at the same contractors is general and operations managers — price it against that row, not the supervisor row.

Deciding which seat you have is the first half of the hire, and our guide to how to hire an HVAC service manager covers that definition.

The demand picture behind the seat is real.

BLS projects the supervisory category to grow 4.1% from 2025 to 2035 — above the 3.5% average for all occupations — with about 48,900 openings a year across all industries.

The trade it supervises is under the same pressure: HVAC mechanics and installers themselves are projected to grow 10.9% over the same period, with about 40,600 openings a year.

Inside the band, price the seat by its scope rather than by years served: how many trucks and techs the manager runs, residential service versus commercial accounts, whether they own the maintenance-agreement book and the price book, and whether they carry the company's qualifier or certification role.

Price the seat you are actually writing.

Pay level and pay plan are separate decisions.

The level is the market number above; the plan is the rule that turns the seat's results into a paycheck.

The plan changes behaviour and overtime arithmetic.

The four blocks are the same ones you can put a technician on: hourly, flat rate, commission, or a hybrid of a fixed base plus a variable layer.

The full comparison — what each costs per billable hour, the behaviour each buys, the Davis-Bacon layer on federal work — is our guide to the hvac technician pay plan options; this section covers only how they translate to a desk.

Flat rate is a truck plan, not a desk plan: it pays defined tasks out of a price book, and the manager's work — dispatch decisions, callbacks, pricing reviews, personnel — is not a bookable task.

A commission-only plan ties the seat's pay to sales, while the outcomes you hired the seat to police — quality, callbacks — earn it nothing.

A hybrid keeps the seat paid for judgment while putting money on the outcomes you hired it to move: a fixed base set from the figures above, plus one or two targeted incentives.

However you label the fixed piece — hourly, salary, annual — the wage-and-hour floor underneath does not move.

The variable layer is this page's real subject, and the design rule is one sentence: pay the bonus on the metrics the seat controls — the trucks' efficiency and average ticket, callback and repeat-repair rates, service-agreement renewals, and the margin the price book is supposed to produce — not on the ones it merely inherits.

Define the metric, the measurement and the payout before you promise it; a bonus plan the manager cannot see the math on is a resignation letter with a delay.

And structure it against your own P&L: our research found no primary-source figure for a typical bonus percentage or split in these trades — the industry numbers in circulation come from consultant material and paywalled member surveys — so we can't verify any percentage you see quoted.

Then the compliance layer, before the plan goes live.

Flat-rate and commissioned pay do not remove Fair Labor Standards Act overtime: commissions count in the regular rate whether or not they are the employee's only pay, and flat-rate job pay is regular-rated by dividing total job pay by hours actually worked, with an extra half-time for each hour over 40.

The commission exemption — FLSA section 7(i) — requires every test to hold at once: a retail or service establishment, a regular rate above 1.5 times the minimum wage, and more than half of pay from commissions over a representative period of at least a month.

Whether an HVAC or plumbing service company can use it has been decided case by case since the Department of Labor withdrew its old list of non-retail businesses in May 2020.

A salary title answers none of this by itself: overtime is owed unless a specific exemption applies, and whether a salaried manager fits one is a classification question this page does not restate — put the seat's actual duties and pay mix in front of your employment attorney before the offer letter goes out.

The research behind this page found no federal or primary-source number for any of these premiums.

BLS wage data exclude shift differentials and non-production bonuses, so structure them against your own market and your own payroll, not against a published figure.

Licence and certification scope.

When the manager carries the company's state qualifier role, or holds the EPA Section 608 Universal certification that covers all appliance types under Types I, II and III, you are paying for legal scope the company trades on.

The licence questions themselves — whose name qualifies the firm, what happens when a qualifier leaves — are covered in our how to hire an HVAC service manager guide.

Here, price the scope into the base deliberately, and confirm with the issuing board what each credential actually permits in your jurisdiction before you attach a dollar to it.

On-call coverage.

BLS notes that HVAC techs may be on call for emergencies and sometimes work overtime or irregular schedules during peak heating and cooling season; in O*NET survey data, 17% of HVACR mechanics report a typical week over 40 hours (83% report 40).

When the manager holds the after-hours phone, the same rules follow the money as on the trucks — provided the manager is overtime-eligible, since a specific exemption changes the analysis (see the caution in the pay-plan section above).

A stipend or bonus you announce in advance is not discretionary: production, quality and attendance bonuses, and any announced plan, count in the overtime regular rate, and calling a payment "discretionary" does not make it so.

A quarterly bonus can stay out of the weekly math until the amount is known, but it must then be apportioned back over the weeks it was earned, with extra half-time for each week that had overtime hours.

Lead and bench pay.

When your best tech starts supervising a second person's work, the market reference is the supervisory bracket itself: an $81,800 median within plumbing, heating and air-conditioning contractors, against the $60,030 median for HVAC mechanics in the same industry cut and release.

If your lead premium leaves the tech far below that bracket, expect the new title to become a resume line.

The salary number understates the package, because BLS wage figures exclude benefits entirely.

Two offers at the same $81,800 can land far apart once tools, truck and coverage are priced.

Benefits.

The BLS Employee Benefits tables we checked (March 2026) break out only broad occupation groups and establishment sizes — no HVAC-contractor row — so read them as the market around you, not a contractor benchmark.

Among private-industry installation, maintenance and repair workers, 78% had access to employer retirement benefits and 60% participated, and 81% had access to employer medical care plans.

Establishment size is the gap worth knowing you sit in: at establishments with 1–49 workers, 55% of workers had retirement access versus 91% at 500+, and 55% had medical access versus 90%.

On premiums, private employers paid 80% of single-coverage costs on average, while employees at 1–49-worker establishments paid 36% of family premiums versus 25% at 500+.

Paid leave for the group ran 82% with paid sick leave, 93% paid vacation and 94% paid holidays.

The federal legal floor is lower than the market: the ACA employer mandate reaches only employers averaging at least 50 full-time employees, including full-time equivalents, so below that size federal law does not require the coverage (state law can differ).

One competitive note — union shops in private industry, which you may be bidding supervisors against, sit at 91% retirement access versus 70% for nonunion across all occupations.

Tools.

If any required tool cost runs through the employee's paycheck, know the federal line first: under 29 CFR 531.35, a required tool cost violates the FLSA in any workweek where it cuts into the minimum wage or overtime owed — wages must be paid free and clear, and kickbacks to the employer do not count as wages paid.

Where you reimburse tools or expenses instead, the reimbursement is tax-free only under an accountable plan, meaning the employee substantiates the expenses and returns any excess.

Truck.

The take-home truck is an IRS question before it is a recruiting one.

A van with a loaded gross vehicle weight of 14,000 pounds or less is a "qualified nonpersonal use vehicle" — personal use is not a taxable fringe benefit — if it is marked with permanent decals or advertising, seats only the driver (or driver plus one), and has permanent shelving filling most of the cargo area or an open cargo area that always carries trade equipment.

Where a company vehicle does not qualify, the IRS commuting rule values commuting use at $1.50 per one-way commute, included in wages unless the employee reimburses it — and the rule carries conditions of its own.

Price the whole sheet before you post, not the salary line alone.

When the level, the plan and the package are set, see what candidates see on the HVAC service manager jobs page — your offer now competes with every other sheet on the board.

This page is employer business and career information, not legal advice. Overtime, bonus and classification rules are federal law plus state law, and benefit requirements depend on your size and state; licence scope is set by the issuing board. Confirm your pay plan with an employment attorney or the Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division before it goes live.