About This Site
HVAC Technician (hvactechnician.us) is a set of free tools for people who work in heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and refrigeration, or who are thinking about it. Each page is a working tool or an official data table. Every figure comes from a U.S. government source, and each page lists its sources.
What the tools do
- HVAC technician pay: BLS wage percentiles by state, metro and nonmetro area, where your own pay falls, and an apprentice earnings planner.
- Salary by state: a sortable table of every state and DC.
- EPA 608 checker: applies 40 CFR 82.152 and 82.161 to your work.
- License by state: quotes from official state board pages; 22 states are marked Not verified.
- Room AC BTU calculator: the ENERGY STAR sizing chart and adjustments.
- SEER2 savings calculator: DOE minimums by region and yearly cooling cost.
- Job outlook: BLS projections and state job counts.
How results are computed
Wages are cells of the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics May 2025 files for SOC 49-9021. Because bls.gov refuses automated downloads from our server, the files were taken from Internet Archive copies of the official bls.gov files and checked against the BLS Public Data API; all 50 values checked matched. Annual pay from hourly pay uses the BLS 2,080-hour year. The 608 checker follows the definitions and rule text in the eCFR. The BTU calculator uses the ENERGY STAR chart and its four adjustments with no added rules. The SEER2 calculator uses the SEER definition in 10 CFR part 430 and the standards in 10 CFR 430.32. Unit tests check every calculator against a separate reference implementation.
Data sources
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: OEWS May 2025 and the Occupational Outlook Handbook.
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Electronic Code of Federal Regulations (40 CFR part 82, 10 CFR part 430, 29 CFR part 29).
- ENERGY STAR (room air conditioner sizing).
- U.S. Energy Information Administration (residential electricity prices, used only as a labelled reference).
- U.S. Department of Labor (federal minimum wage).
- Official state licensing board and agency pages.
Updates
The wage and electricity price files are refreshed from the official sources when new releases come out. The rule text is checked against the eCFR and agency pages. Pages show the date of the data they use.
What this site does not do
No rankings of schools or programs, no lead forms, no reviews, and no company recommendations. If an official source does not answer a question, we say so instead of guessing.