What should an HVAC or plumbing job offer letter include? (template)

Write the letter so the terms a tech could dispute in month one are all in it: how flat-rate pay is calculated, whether the on-call rotation is paid, who owns the tools in the box, and what happens if the licence check comes back slower than the start date.

The offer letter is where those mechanics become the written record both sides accepted.

Send it with the offer, not after the first day.

A complete offer letter for a tech runs through ten short elements.

Fill each in your own words — this is the outline:

1. Position and reporting.

The job title you are hiring into — service technician, installer, journeyman plumber — who the tech reports to, and whether the role is full-time or part-time.

2. Start date.

The first day, the normal start time, and where the tech reports that morning: the shop, a job site, or a ride-along.

3. Pay plan.

The plan you use — hourly, flat rate, commission, or a base-plus mix — with its mechanics, not just the number.

The next section covers what to spell out.

4. Schedule and on-call.

The normal weekly schedule, the hours you expect, and the on-call rotation the tech is joining: how often the after-hours phone reaches them and how after-hours work is handled.

5. Truck and tools.

Whether the tech takes a truck home, what the shop provides against what the tech brings, and which policy document governs the details.

6. Benefits summary.

Health coverage, paid time off, retirement — in a line or two, with the plan documents named rather than their terms restated in the letter.

7. Probationary period.

The length and the review that ends it.

Read the Montana note below before you treat the line as boilerplate.

8. Contingencies.

Each condition the offer rides on — licence verification, motor-vehicle record, drug test, skills test, work-eligibility paperwork — with who runs each check.

9. Employment statement.

If your company's letters carry an at-will statement, keep it consistent with your handbook — and read the Montana note below, because one state treats that line differently.

10. Acceptance window.

How long the offer stays open, how the tech accepts it, and who to call with questions.

That probationary line is more than boilerplate in one state.

Montana is the exception to at-will employment: under its Wrongful Discharge from Employment Act, once an employee has completed the employer's probationary period, a discharge without good cause is wrongful.

In Montana, during the probationary period itself, employment can be ended at the will of either the employer or the employee, on notice to the other, for any reason or for no reason.

Our research did not confirm a default or maximum probationary length in Montana's law, so set the length deliberately and say what the review at the end of it measures.

Be equally deliberate about the hours you write.

An offer letter that promises a fixed number of paid hours all year is a promise a shoulder season can break.

If a slow stretch forces reduced hours, work-sharing — Short-Time Compensation — is the alternative a Department of Labor fact sheet describes: programs established in state law that meet the federal definition and let employers cut hours instead of laying off.

That undated fact sheet puts the count of states with such programs at 33 — a count that may be stale.

Treat it as a reason to ask your state workforce agency what exists, not as a figure to quote in an offer.

Write the mechanics, not just the number.

A rate on its own — hourly, flat rate, or base plus commission — leaves the questions that actually come up unanswered: when commission is earned and when it is paid, what happens to a flat-rate job that comes back as a callback, when the next pay review lands.

Whatever plan you use, the letter should state the rate or how the rate is set, the pay frequency, the mechanics in between, and when compensation gets reviewed.

If the plan is flat rate or commission, the mechanics multiply — and both plans have their own guides: our flat-rate pay plan guide covers job pricing, callback handling and how work gets assigned, and our commission pay plans guide covers when a commission is earned versus when it is paid, and draws.

Put the headline terms in the offer letter and let the plan document carry the rest: the letter names the document, the document does the detail.

The one line the letter should not carry is "salary means no overtime."

Hourly and flat-rate techs are owed overtime unless an exemption applies, and one of them — the FLSA's section 7(i) — covers commissioned employees of a retail or service establishment only if their regular rate is more than 1.5× the minimum wage and more than half their pay over a representative period of at least one month is commissions.

We walk the exemption tests in our guide to overtime for flat-rate and commission techs; in the letter, describe the plan, not the exemption.

If your company is signatory to a collective bargaining agreement, take the wages, benefits and pension wording in the offer straight from your CBA documents.

The pension piece deserves care: a union-signatory contractor that withdraws from a multiemployer pension plan — in a complete withdrawal or a partial one — can owe the plan withdrawal liability under ERISA (29 U.S.C. § 1381).

Building-and-construction-industry plans carry special withdrawal rules our research did not cover, so confirm the agreement's own terms rather than relying on a template.

For the market side of the number, our salary pages collect the published federal wage data: see the HVAC technician salary page and the plumber salary page before you fix a rate.

Name the arrangement, then hand off the detail.

If the tech takes a truck home, the offer says so — and says which policy governs personal use, the commuting rule, fuel, telematics and insurance.

Those terms are their own document: our take home vehicle policy template covers them line by line.

What the letter should not do is grant the truck in one sentence and leave the rules to be invented after the first weekend.

Tools split the same way: what the shop provides, what the tech is expected to bring, and whether there is an allowance or a purchase program.

The offer letter states the outcome you decided; the reasoning — provide versus pay a tool allowance, replacements, lost-tool rules — is its own decision and its own guide.

State the split in the letter plainly rather than leaving it to be discovered in the handbook.

On-call terms are easy for two people to remember differently, so write what the rotation is: how often the after-hours phone reaches the tech and the response expectation.

The pay for that time is its own subject — our on-call pay guide covers the structures — and the offer letter's job is to say that the rotation exists and which document sets its terms.

List each check the offer rides on and who runs it, so the conditions are in the letter rather than in memory: licence verification for the role you are hiring into, a motor-vehicle record check for anyone who will drive a company truck, a drug test where your company screens, a background check, a skills assessment, and the Form I-9 work-eligibility paperwork required for every person a U.S. employer hires in the United States.

Each check has its own how-to.

Our guide to verifying a licence before hiring covers board lookups, licence status and renewal records, our MVR checks guide covers driving-record requests, our background checks guide covers criminal-record screening and the FCRA steps, and our drug testing guide covers screening and state marijuana-law collisions.

Write each contingency as a condition of the offer, not a formality — the start date moves if the check doesn't clear.

If the offer is contingent on passing a skills test, the test carries obligations of its own: under the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures, a hiring test with adverse impact on a race, sex or ethnic group is treated as discriminatory unless the procedure has been validated.

Keep the test job-related and the scoring consistent, and check with an employment attorney before you gate an offer on a test that has not been validated.

Once every contingency clears, the offer letter's job is done.

Our guide to onboarding new technicians picks up where the accepted offer ends: the paperwork deadlines, the truck and tools, the ride-alongs and the check-ins.

We can't answer this one, and we would rather say so than guess.

The areas a pay section most wants to get right — final-paycheck deadlines, paid-sick-leave notices, pay-transparency postings, written commission agreements and wage-deduction limits — are exactly the areas our research for this page did not cover.

We can't tell you which states require a written pay notice, what it must contain, or by when it must be given, and a list we produced without that research would be worse than none.

So treat this page as the drafting checklist, not the compliance answer.

Before an offer letter goes out, confirm your state's requirements with your state labor department, and have an employment attorney review the template your company reuses — and re-check it before you use it in a new state.

Where a job posting advertises a pay range, our guide to pay transparency laws covers the posting side separately.

The offer letter is one document in the process; the full guide to hiring HVAC and plumbing techs covers the steps around it, from sourcing through screening to keeping the techs you hire.

This page is employer career and business information, not legal advice. Confirm the requirements that apply to your company with your state labor department or an employment attorney before you act.