How much should an HVAC company spend on Google Ads?

Every HVAC owner asks some version of this question, and most of the answers online are a range so wide it’s useless. “Somewhere between $1,000 and $25,000” doesn’t help you decide what to put on the card next month.

So this post does two things. It shows you what leads and customers actually cost on Google right now, using the biggest data sets we could find. Then it gives you the math to turn that into your own budget.

What HVAC leads cost on Google in 2026

A click on an air conditioning ad averaged $9.68 and a heating click $9.30 across more than 3,200 home services campaigns LocaliQ analyzed. Clicks aren’t what you’re buying, though. Here’s what a lead costs by campaign type:

One warning about that table. SearchLight’s blended average across all Google Ads was $104 a lead, which sounds great until you see what’s inside it. Branded searches, people typing your company name, cost $34 a lead. Those folks already knew you from your trucks, your yard signs or a neighbor. If an agency reports a nice low average and most of it is branded traffic, they’re taking credit for your reputation.

The number that matters for growth is non-branded search: “AC repair near me,” “furnace replacement,” “heat pump installer.” That’s where new customers come from, and in SearchLight’s data it was almost 80% of the money contractors spent.

Cost per lead is the wrong number to stare at

A lead is a phone call or a form. It isn’t a job. In the same January 2026 data, only 37.6% of non-branded search leads booked an appointment, and the cost to land one paying customer came out to $804.

That looks scary on its own. Now put it next to the average ticket on those jobs, which was $2,516. You spent about $800 to win a customer worth roughly $2,500 on the first visit, before the maintenance plan and before the system replacement a few years down the road.

Local Services Ads look better on this measure. Across trades, a paying customer from LSA cost $315.52 in May 2026, and HVAC brought in about $7.20 in closed revenue for every dollar spent, with the highest average ticket of any trade at $2,451.64.

So when you judge your ads, judge them on cost per booked job and revenue per dollar. Cost per lead is a gauge on the dashboard, not the destination.

The budget math, worked backward

This is the method we use with clients. It takes five minutes with a calculator.

1. Decide how many new paying customers you want from Google each month. Be honest about how many your crews can actually handle.
2. Multiply by your cost per paying customer. If you don’t have your own numbers yet, start with about $800 for non-branded search. After 60 to 90 days of clean tracking, replace it with your real figure.
3. Check the result against your revenue. If the budget eats more than the jobs bring in, the problem is usually booking rate or ticket size, not the ads.

Example. You want 8 new customers a month from search. 8 × $800 = $6,400 a month in ad spend. At a $2,500 average ticket, that’s about $20,000 in first-visit revenue, and every one of those customers is a shot at a maintenance agreement.

Sanity check against revenue. ACCA recommends that HVAC contractors who want to grow invest about 10% of gross revenue in marketing, with roughly 35% of that going to digital. For a $2 million company, that’s $200,000 a year in marketing and about $70,000 for digital, or close to $5,800 a month. That digital number has to cover Google, Facebook, your website and SEO, so it lines up with the example above for a company that size.

When a budget is too small to work

There is a floor. At $9 to $10 a click, a $1,000 monthly budget buys around 100 clicks. At normal conversion rates, that’s a handful of leads a month, and one slow week makes the whole channel look broken. It also gives Google’s automated bidding almost nothing to learn from.

Our rule of thumb: if you can’t fund non-branded search at a level that produces at least 15 to 20 leads a month (roughly $2,500 to $3,000 at today’s prices), start with Local Services Ads, where you pay per lead instead of per click, and add search once LSA is producing.

Five places HVAC ad budgets leak

Most ad accounts don’t have a budget problem. They have a leak. These are the usual ones in HVAC.

1. Paid calls that go to voicemail

On Local Services Ads, Google charges you for a missed call during business hours if the caller stays on the line for more than 20 seconds. On search ads, you already paid for the click. Either way, an unanswered phone is money gone. A missed-call text-back that replies within a minute, plus AI that answers after hours, closes most of that gap.

2. Sending every click to your homepage

Someone who searched “furnace repair” should land on a furnace repair page with your phone number at the top, not on a homepage that talks about everything you do. Matching the page to the search raises conversion rate, which lowers cost per lead without spending a dollar more.

3. Tracking forms but not booked jobs

If Google only knows that someone filled out a form, it will happily find you more form-fillers, including the ones who never book. Sending booked and sold jobs back into Google Ads tells the system which leads turned into money, so it bids for more of those.

4. Branded and non-branded lumped together

Run your company-name keywords in their own campaign with a small budget. It protects your name from competitors bidding on it and keeps your real new-customer numbers honest.

5. The same budget all year

Leads get more expensive when everyone is busy. Across trades, LSA cost per lead rose from $55.08 in March 2026 to $63.29 in May. Push spend into peak season when the phones ring on their own, and use the shoulder months to work your past customers. ACCA puts the return on marketing to lapsed customers at $8 to $12 per dollar, compared with $3 to $4 for finding new ones.

What we’d do with your first $3,000

If an HVAC owner told us they had $3,000 a month and no clear tracking, this is the order we’d go in:

• Get Local Services Ads live and verified, with message and booking leads turned on so nights and weekends still produce.
• Put a small branded campaign up to protect the company name.
• Spend the rest on non-branded search for your two or three highest-ticket services, each with its own landing page.
• Turn on missed-call text-back and automatic review requests before spending a dollar more, because both make every lead you pay for worth more.

That order is the backbone of our 90-Day Local Takeover for HVAC companies. If you’d rather run it yourself, the steps above will get you most of the way.

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