HVAC slow season: what to market, and when

When is the HVAC slow season?

It’s the shoulder weeks between heating and cooling demand, and the dates move with your climate. Will Merritt, writing in ACHR News in October 2026, says call volume drops off significantly in September for most HVAC companies. An earlier column of his notes that summer is the money season in southern climates and that it runs the opposite way in the north. Merritt is a partner at an HVAC marketing agency, so weigh that. No public national calendar turned up.

Build your own. Pull two or three years of calls by week and lay them next to your local degree days. The EIA measures heating and cooling need against a 65°F base, so a run of days near 65 is your shoulder season in plain numbers. In Jobber’s survey of 1,050 owners, 34% across all trades named weather and seasonality as a limit on growth.

What should HVAC contractors market in the slow season?

Sell the pre-season visit, because the homeowner gets a real reason to book now. ENERGY STAR tells homeowners to have a contractor do annual pre-season check-ups, with cooling in spring and heating in fall, since contractors get busy once summer and winter come. You can say the same thing in your email and credit the advice.

This table assumes a four-season market. Slide it for yours. A shop in Phoenix and a shop in Minneapolis won’t share dates.

How many maintenance agreements can one tech carry?

One published rule of thumb is 500 plans per service tech, but check the math against your own visits. Merritt’s sum assumes four calls a day, two of them maintenance, which is 10 maintenance calls a week for 50 weeks, or 500 visits. He calls that a perfect-world target. If your plan includes two visits a year, those 500 visits cover 250 plans. No primary source sets a benchmark, so treat either figure as a starting point.

Timing is the trap. Say, as a made-up example, you hold 600 two-visit agreements and run three techs at 10 maintenance calls a week each, or 30 a week. Spring’s 600 visits would take 20 weeks. If everyone wants their tune-up in the same five weeks of April and May, you can do 150 of them. So stagger agreement customers by month from the day they sign, and offer the earliest slots first.

Plans give homeowners a reason to stay. Merritt lists priority service, discounted or waived diagnostic fees and repair discounts as common benefits in his ACHR column on agreements. Demand for upkeep is there: Angi’s 2025 home spending report found 44% of surveyed homeowners completed at least one maintenance project that year, though that covers all home maintenance, not HVAC.

Who should you contact first?

Start with people who have a reason to say yes this month. Merritt’s October column suggests pulling these reports from your field software, whether that’s Housecall Pro, ServiceTitan or something else:

How you reach them matters. A CSR calling a past customer is a different thing from an automated blast. Email needs a clear opt-out, a valid postal address and opt-outs honored within 10 business days, per the FTC’s CAN-SPAM guide. Automated texts have stricter rules, covered in this guide to text back and consent.

• Customers who skipped AC maintenance this year.
• Open repair or replacement estimates.
• Maintenance customers who didn’t renew.
• Systems 12 or 15 years old and up.
• Homes with multiple repairs in the last two years.
• Recommendations a customer didn’t act on, like duct changes.

Should you cut prices or pause ads in the slow months?

Discount with a purpose, and pause ads only for hours you can’t serve. Merritt suggests a small discount on equipment, pairing it with manufacturer rebates, and says 10% off works great. That’s his opinion. Run the sum on your margin first, and steer the offer to replacements or duct jobs you’d rather do when crews have time.

On ads, two trade voices pull different ways. Tracy Paul argues in ACHR News that turning marketing off and on forces you to rebuild momentum at a higher cost. Invoca suggests pausing paid campaigns during hours you can’t dispatch or book callers. Both can hold. Keep the budget steady and cut the hours nobody answers.

Finished tune-ups are also your best moment for an honest review ask, with nothing offered for it. GHOBZ writes and sends marketing for the slow months as part of its contractor marketing, first call to next job.