Last updated 25 September 2026
An HVAC lead never says how often the law wants that system checked.
Leads.work charges £34 plus VAT for a business air con lead and £15 for a repair or service one, with an £11 weekly fee on top. PromoSEO, the only seller we found selling nothing but commercial HVAC leads, says its packages typically start at £500 a month. A business's click on an HVAC search, bought straight from Google, costs £1.46 to £24.04.
Every one of those prices is for a lead, and a lead is one call. A business with an air con system over 12kW has to get it inspected at least every 5 years, and with enough refrigerant in it, leak-checked every year as well. That customer is a contract. A lead that arrives as a broken unit can be either one, and nothing on it says which.
A seller's lead criteria, word for word
"Homeowner, decision maker."
That's the first line of Leads 2 Trade's criteria for leads on a page titled "HVAC sales leads", which also says it connects "home owners and commercial businesses". Of the lead sellers below, only PromoSEO says its leads come from businesses alone. Who sells to businesses.
Where we stand
We don't sell HVAC leads. We help you get your own.
This guide is the honest version of what buying HVAC leads costs, and who else gets them. What we do instead is build HVAC contractors a website that turns visits into calls, and run Google Ads in an account in your own name, so every lead that comes in is a customer who found you, and nobody else was sold it.
What you are buying
The service is the lead. The contract is what it's worth.
Checkatrade puts a home or office air con service at £70 to £120 a unit, and maintenance cover for one unit at £40 or more a month. So the same customer is worth about £95 once, from £480 a year on cover, and from £2,400 over 5 years, the longest gov.uk allows between air con inspections. The table sets two Leads.work prices against each of those and against the installs, winning one quote in 3.
| Work | Typical UK price | Leads.work service lead, £15 | Leads.work business lead, £34 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Service one office air con unit | £70 to £120 | £45 a win, 47% of it | £102 a win, 107% of it |
| A year of maintenance cover, one unit | £480 | £45 a win, 9% of it | £102 a win, 21% of it |
| Five years of cover, one TM44 cycle | £2,400 | £45 a win, 2% of it | £102 a win, 4% of it |
| MVHR in a 3 to 4 bed house | £5,000 to £8,000 | £45 a win, 1% of it | £102 a win, 2% of it |
| Air con for a small to medium commercial space | £3,500 to £10,000 | £45 a win, 1% of it | £102 a win, 2% of it |
| Kitchen extraction for a café or small bistro | £5,000 to £12,000 | £45 a win, 1% of it | £102 a win, 1% of it |
| Kitchen extraction for a restaurant or pub | £12,000 to £30,000 | £45 a win, under 1% of it | £102 a win, under 1% of it |
| Multi-zone air con for a larger office | £20,000 to £50,000 | £45 a win, under 1% of it | £102 a win, under 1% of it |
Service: Checkatrade cost guide, Jun 2026. Year of cover: Checkatrade monthly cover price x 12, Jun 2026. Five years of cover: Checkatrade monthly cover price x 60 months. MVHR: MyJobQuote cost guide, Aug 2026. Small commercial: B-Engineering Group price guide, Jul 2026. Café kitchen: Fan Rescue cost guide, Jul 2026. Restaurant kitchen: Fan Rescue cost guide, Jul 2026. Larger office: B-Engineering Group price guide, Jul 2026. Each range is worked at its middle. The two cover rows are our sum from Checkatrade's monthly figure, which is a starting price. The install guides are installers' own, and quote their prices before VAT. MyJobQuote tells its trades to expect to win one quote in 3, and we use that here. Both lead prices exclude VAT.
As a rough rule, winning a customer should use up 10 to 15 percent of the work's value. Bought for a single service, even the £15 lead eats 47% of it, and the £34 business lead costs more than the job. Kept on cover for a year, the £34 lead drops to 21%, and over 5 years to 4%. On an install, either price is small next to the job. The lead price hardly moves. What moves is whether the call becomes a contract, and who else got it.
If you want contracts, not call-outs
Ask on the first visit how many units there are, who controls them, and when the last leak check and inspection were done. Then price the year, not the visit. A seller can't tell you which leads come with a plant room, so you pay the same for a single split in a shop as for a whole office floor.
If kitchens fill your diary
Extraction for a café runs £5,000 to £12,000 and for a restaurant or pub £12,000 to £30,000, going by one installer's guide, so any seller's lead price is small beside it. The gas interlock on those jobs is a legal point, not a sales one, and it's set out below.
Your numbers
Put a year on the customer, then test the lead price.
It opens on a year of cover for one unit. Switch to a single service to see how little a call-out can carry, or type in what a site with several units is worth to you. Say how many quotes you give per win, and finish with the lead price you've been offered.
WHAT CAN YOU PAY FOR AN HVAC LEAD?
Pick a job, or type in what yours are worth
Starts on one in three, the figure MyJobQuote tells its own trades to expect. Put in yours.
You can pay up to about
£24
a lead, winning one in 3
- Healthy range, per won job
- £48 to £72
- Which per lead is
- £16 to £24
Put a seller's price in the last box and this will tell you what each won job would cost you.
Use the 10 to 15 percent band as a sense check; it isn't a measurement. And a year of cover only counts if the customer signs for it.
Who sells them
Seven places selling HVAC leads, and how many of them mean a business.
Every row below comes from what the seller publishes itself. Several put "HVAC" or "commercial" on the page and describe homeowners in the detail, so read the criteria before the headline.
| Seller | Price | Who the leads are | In their words |
|---|---|---|---|
| PromoSEO | Packages from £500 a month | Businesses only, one contractor per area | "100 percent exclusive commercial HVAC leads" |
| Leads.work | £34 + VAT a business lead, £11 a week | Homes and businesses, 1 to 3 others per job | "sent to Connect accounts first" |
| Leads 2 Trade | By phone only | Homeowner in its criteria, shared on some tiers | "Homeowner, decision maker." |
| Lead Pronto | From £10 a lead, £130 an appointment | Homeowners | "from homeowners actively looking for cooling" |
| The Trade League | £299 to £799 + VAT a month, plus ad spend | Homes and businesses, one engineer per postcode | "service contracts, and commercial fit-outs" |
| The Lead Generation Agency | Not published | Business decision-makers, by outbound | "pay-per-lead or retainer" |
| Tracker | Not published, 3 day free trial | Public sector tenders | "Air Conditioning Tenders" |
PromoSEO: the one seller built for commercial work
It says its leads come from "property managers, facility teams, industrial sites, restaurants, offices, warehouses and retail units", and lists "system maintenance contracts, ventilation upgrades, ductwork installation" among them. Pricing is "cost per lead and pay per conversion", with packages that "typically start at £500 per month", and each lead goes to "one contractor per area". It lists Google Ads and Local Services Ads among its channels, which are the same searches you can bid on yourself. The page doesn't say whether the £500 includes VAT.
Leads.work prices a business lead above a home one
Its Connect price list charges £27 plus VAT for a home air con lead and £34 for a business one, the only published split between the two we found. Repairs and servicing cost £15 either way. There's no ventilation or kitchen extraction category on the list at all, so those buyers aren't on sale there. The "small weekly service fee of £11.00" comes to £572 plus VAT over a year.
Its terms say "Customers compete with 1 to 3 tradesmen for the same work, with no more than 5 competing for any given job." When several engineers ring the same facilities manager, asking about the contract on that first call is how to be the one they remember.
HVAC in the title, homeowners in the criteria
Leads 2 Trade titles its page "HVAC sales leads", says it serves "home owners and commercial businesses", then lists "Homeowner, decision maker." as its first lead criterion. Its tiers, from one installer to "up to 4 times", and its phone-only pricing are covered in our air conditioning leads guide. Lead Pronto sells air con leads from £10 and appointments from £130, and says its leads come "from homeowners actively looking for cooling". It lists "commercial units" among the job types it can filter for.
The Trade League: businesses in the pitch, summer in the plan
It generates leads "from homeowners and businesses", names "service contracts, and commercial fit-outs", and charges £299 to £799 plus VAT a month with the ad spend on top, one engineer per postcode. It says it will "front-load your campaigns ahead of the summer peaks". That suits homeowners. Business searches barely have a peak, as the season data shows.
Outbound meetings and tender alerts
The Lead Generation Agency sells "UK-run B2B outbound", conversations with decision-makers booked for you, "pay-per-lead or retainer", with no price on its HVAC page. Anyone emailing or ringing businesses in your name is doing marketing you share responsibility for, and the rules on that are further down.
Tracker sells tender alerts with a 3 day free trial and no published price. The tenders themselves are free: public contracts over £12,000 including VAT are on Contracts Finder, where you can search and apply without an account. One on Find a Tender shows the shape: Capital City College tendered for "a single HVAC contractor for all sites", split into a heating and ventilation lot and an air conditioning lot, in November 2025, then published a termination notice ten days later. How tendering works is in our construction leads guide.
Everything here about Leads.work's contract comes from its own published terms and conditions, last read on 24 September 2026. Terms get revised, so check yours against the current version before you act on anything.
Rather have HVAC leads that are yours alone?
That's what we do. We don't sell leads. We build the website and run the Google Ads that bring HVAC customers straight to you, in an ad account in your name that stays yours if you ever leave.
See pricingBuying the click yourself
The dearest HVAC click is a business asking for an install.
"hvac leads", the search a contractor makes to find a seller, gets about 30 searches a month. Google reports no average click price for it, but advertisers bid up to £17.06 to sit at the top of the page. The business searches run from £1.46 for "hvac engineer" to £24.04 for "commercial air conditioning installation". The per-lead figures divide each click by WordStream's 7.33% search conversion rate for home improvement, an American benchmark, so treat them as rough.
| Search | Searches a month | Per click | Per lead |
|---|---|---|---|
| commercial air conditioning installation | 390 | £24.04 | £328 |
| tm44 inspection | 880 | £11.33 | £155 |
| air conditioning maintenance contract | 90 | £9.84 | £134 |
| tr19 cleaning | 140 | £9.08 | £124 |
| kitchen extraction cleaning | 260 | £8.83 | £120 |
| mvhr installation | 320 | £8.69 | £119 |
| commercial hvac | 720 | £4.93 | £67 |
| ventilation engineer | 720 | £4.75 | £65 |
| commercial ventilation | 210 | £4.45 | £61 |
| air conditioning maintenance | 1,600 | £4.24 | £58 |
| commercial kitchen extraction | 320 | £4.06 | £55 |
| hvac contractors | 260 | £3.86 | £53 |
| hvac engineer | 1,300 | £1.46 | £20 |
UK Google Ads data, pulled 24 September 2026. Google works these click prices out from bids; many advertisers pay under them. Searches a month are yearly averages, and two are lifted by a single month: "commercial air conditioning installation" hit 2,400 in September 2025 and "commercial hvac" hit 3,600 in October 2025.
At £20 to £328 a lead, your own ads cost more than Leads.work's £34 on every search but "hvac engineer". On a single service, neither sum works. On a contract or an install, what matters is who the lead is and who else rang them:
- Write the ad for contracts, not call-outs
- Name the leak checks and the inspection
- Keep it running through the winter
- The call comes to you alone
- Pay Google direct, no markup
- The account stays yours
"tm44 inspection" costs £11.33 a click, about £155 a lead, and the business typing it has a legal deadline. Only an accredited energy assessor can do the inspection, so bid on it only if you or a partner is accredited, then quote for the work the report turns up. Our guide to how much to spend on Google Ads sizes the budget around it.
Google Local Services Ads
Google lists "HVAC (heating or air conditioning)" as a UK Local Services Ads category, and PromoSEO names Local Services Ads among the channels it uses. You pass Google's business checks, pay per answered call, and in the UK there are no lead credits to claim. The checks and the call charges are set out in our Local Services Ads explainer.
The checks the customer owes
The law puts the checks on the business, and a contract can pass them to you.
gov.uk says an air conditioning system must be inspected by an energy assessor every 5 years, and "If you do not get your air-conditioning inspected every 5 years, you will be fined £300." Its guidance applies that to any system over 12kW, counts small units together when their combined output goes over it, and treats every unit under one person's control as one system. As a rough guide it puts 12kW at about 200 square metres of general office, 100 with heavy IT, or 250 of shop floor. Trading Standards enforce it, with a further £200 fine for not producing the report within 7 days of being asked.
The duty sits with whoever controls the system, usually the owner. But the guidance adds that a maintenance contract "may specify the facilities management, or servicing company, as the controller", and then that company may become responsible under the regulations too, while the landlord or occupier keeps a parallel duty. Read the controller clause before you sign a contract, and if you take the duty on, price it in.
Leak checks on a calendar
gov.uk makes the user of the equipment responsible for leak checks. For R410A, that's at least every 12 months from 2.4kg and every 6 months from 24kg, and the user keeps 5 years of records, including your company's name and certificate number.
The inspection you can't do yourself
Only an accredited energy assessor can carry out the inspection, and cleaning or adjusting the controls is no part of it. The report lists faults and suggested actions, and the guidance says the assessor may suggest basic maintenance. Somebody then has to quote for that work.
The extraction that counts as a flue
HSE says that where kitchen extraction serves as the flue for a gas appliance, it needs an interlock connecting the airflow to the gas supply, and gas work belongs to a Gas Safe engineer. The ductwork needs access so it can be cleaned regularly.
Who may work on the refrigerant at all, the company F-gas certificate and each engineer's own qualification, is covered in our air conditioning leads guide. The inspection rules here are for England and Wales; Scotland and Northern Ireland run their own.
Selling to a business
Quote a company and the contract law changes under you.
The Consumer Contracts Regulations protect a consumer, "an individual acting for purposes which are wholly or mainly outside that individual's trade, business, craft or profession". A company fitting out its office isn't one, so the 14-day doorstep cancellation right that governs a homeowner's job doesn't attach. What you agree in writing is what binds you both.
An install brings in the Construction Act. It counts the installation of heating, air-conditioning and ventilation systems in a building as construction operations, and doesn't apply to a contract with someone living in the home. On a commercial install that gives you:
- Stage payments on work of 45 days or more
- Stop work after 7 days' notice if unpaid
- Adjudication, decided 28 days from referral
- Interest and compensation on late invoices
The last one is the Late Payment Act, which applies when both sides act in the course of a business: statutory interest plus fixed compensation of £40, £70 or £100 an invoice, by size. Work out what an overdue invoice has earned with our late payment interest calculator, and what adjudication costs in what to do if a customer won't pay. The Construction Act names installation; whether it reaches a servicing contract depends on the work, so don't assume it.
Through the year
Business demand hardly moves, whatever the sellers say about the summer.
UK searches for "hvac engineer" ran from 880 in December 2025 to 1,600 in September 2025, about 1.8 times. Home "air conditioning installation" swung about 17 times over the same months. PromoSEO says commercial demand "stays consistent because commercial environments require rapid response and planned maintenance", and the data backs it. Lead Pronto's "Enquiries peak hard in the summer months" is about homeowners.
UK searches for "hvac engineer", by month
September 2025 to August 2026. Google Ads keyword data, rounded bands.
Inspection searches never go quiet
"tm44 inspection" ran from 590 a month in December 2025 to 1,300 in September 2025. The five-year clock starts when the system goes in, not when the weather turns.
Budget for twelve months, not twelve weeks
A plan weighted to the summer pays heatwave prices for homeowners. The facilities manager searches in December too, and a plan that stops in September misses them.
Where the lead came from
Bought lead or booked meeting, the checks are yours to make.
The Information Commissioner's Office expects anyone buying marketing data to do proportionate checks of their own, and says a seller's assurances aren't enough. In November 2025 it fined Lead Pronto £30,000 over texts sent on consent that named none of the 18 firms it generated leads for.
Outreach to businesses runs on different rules. The ICO says a company or LLP is a "corporate subscriber", and the email and text rule "doesn't apply to corporate subscribers". A sole trader or an ordinary partnership is treated the same as an individual, so check how a café or shop trades before you email it. Marketing to a named person, even at work, still has to comply with UK GDPR. Emailing estimators at contractors is covered in more depth in our construction leads guide.
Before paying for HVAC leads or meetings, ask the seller:
- Is it a business or a homeowner?
- Which website or list did it come from?
- Does the consent name my business?
- How many others were sent it?
- How many units, and who controls them?
Keep the answers with each lead you pay for. If the ICO asks how you checked, that record is your answer.
Which way to go
Buy the contract, not the call-out, and check who's really buying.
Buy per lead if
- You can turn a service into cover
- The seller sources businesses
- The lead names the site and units
- You have engineers free this week
Think twice if
- It is one service on one unit
- The criteria say homeowner
- A weekly fee runs all year
- The plan is weighted to summer
Run your own if
- You want maintenance contracts
- You want the call alone
- You want spend across the year
- Your account, kept if you leave
Plenty of contractors buy a few leads to fill a quiet week and let their contract book carry the rest. Domestic heat pumps have their own grants and rules, set out in our heat pump leads guide, boilers sit in our plumbing leads guide, and the same choice across every trade is in our guide to trade leads.
Our sources
Where these figures come from.
We sell websites and Google Ads to trades, so we have a side in this. That's why this guide quotes each seller in its own words and shows how rarely your own ads beat Leads.work's price per lead.
Seller pages and price lists were read on 24 September 2026. The search figures come from UK Google Ads data pulled 24 September 2026. Job prices are from Checkatrade, MyJobQuote and two installers' guides, B-Engineering Group and Fan Rescue. The inspection rules come from gov.uk's air conditioning inspection guide, the leak checks from gov.uk, the kitchen rules from HSE, and the contract rules from the Construction Act, the Consumer Contracts Regulations and the Late Payment Act on legislation.gov.uk.
Questions contractors ask
HVAC leads, plainly answered.
- How much do HVAC leads cost in the UK?
- Leads.work charges £34 plus VAT for a business air con lead, £27 for a home one and £15 for repairs and servicing, with an £11 weekly fee on top. PromoSEO says its commercial HVAC packages typically start at £500 a month. Lead Pronto sells air con leads from £10 and booked appointments from £130. A business's click on an HVAC search costs £1.46 to £24.04 in Google Ads.
- Are commercial HVAC leads exclusive?
- Depends on the seller. PromoSEO says each of its commercial HVAC leads goes to one contractor per area. Leads.work says its customers compete with 1 to 3 others for a job and never more than 5. Leads 2 Trade sends some tiers to one installer and others up to 4 times, and its lead criteria start with "Homeowner, decision maker", so check whether a lead is a business at all.
- Is a one-off air con service lead worth buying?
- Rarely on its own. At one win in 3, Leads.work's £15 service lead costs £45 per customer won, about 47% of a £95 service. If that customer takes maintenance cover at £40 or more a month, the same £45 is about 9% of the first year. The lead pays when the service turns into a contract.
- Who has to arrange a TM44 air conditioning inspection?
- The person who controls the system, which gov.uk says is usually the owner. Any air con system over 12kW must be inspected by an accredited energy assessor at least every 5 years, and missing it means a £300 fine. A maintenance contract can name the servicing company as the controller, and then that company may be responsible too, so read that clause before you sign.
- How often does a business's air con need an F-gas leak check?
- It depends on how much refrigerant it holds. For R410A, gov.uk says at least once every 12 months from 2.4kg and every 6 months from 24kg, and an automatic leak detection system doubles the gap. The duty sits with the user of the equipment, who must keep 5 years of records, including your company's certificate number.
- Can a business customer cancel an HVAC contract within 14 days?
- Not under the Consumer Contracts Regulations. They protect an individual acting mainly outside their trade or business, so a company buying air con for its office isn't covered by the 14-day doorstep cancellation right. Your own contract terms decide it, so put them in writing.
- Where can I find HVAC maintenance tenders?
- Public sector contracts over £12,000 including VAT are listed on Contracts Finder, and you can search and apply without an account. Higher value ones, usually above £139,688, go on Find a Tender. Tracker, a paid alert service, searches them for you and doesn't publish a price.
- Is commercial HVAC work seasonal?
- Far less than home air con. UK searches for "hvac engineer" ran from 880 in December 2025 to 1,600 in September 2025, about 1.8 times. Searches for home "air conditioning installation" swung about 17 times over the same months.
Keep reading
More straight answers for trades.
A book of maintenance contracts, from businesses that found you first.
We build your website and run Google Ads in an account in your own name, aimed at the contracts and installs you want rather than every one-off call-out. See what it costs, then tell us which contracts and installs you're after, and we'll point the ads at them.