Audit finds 89% of HVAC profit claims online have no source

A September 2026 audit by Sales Roadmap found that 201 of 225 HVAC profitability claims online cite no source, including the most repeated benchmark tied to ACCA. The findings raise questions about how contractors, owners, and advisors use unsourced margin and performance figures in pricing, compensation, and acquisition decisions.

Why it matters: - HVAC owners and operators routinely use online benchmarks to set pricing, commissions, and acquisition assumptions. - When those figures are unsourced or inconsistent, they can drive bad decisions with real payroll and margin consequences. - The audit found no government statistical program publishing common HVAC contractor metrics such as margin, close rate, average ticket, callback rate, or revenue per truck.

What happened: - Sales Roadmap audited HVAC profitability claims circulating online and found 201 of 225 quantitative claims, or 89%, cited no source. - The study ran 10 search queries in September 2026 on topics including HVAC profit margin, gross margin, close rate, average ticket, technician turnover, callback rate, revenue per truck, and financial benchmarking. - Top organic results were retrieved and cached, producing 26 pages. - Four pages failed the claim extractor and were dropped, leaving 22 parsed pages. - Twenty of the 22 parsed pages made at least one quantitative claim. - Ten of those 20 pages carried no sourced figure at all.

The details: - Every extracted claim had to appear verbatim in the cached page text. - Claims that did not match the cached page text were discarded. - Ten pages ranking for the same profitability query stated a net profit margin for HVAC contractors, producing 27 separate net margin figures. - Those net margin figures ranged from 2% to 25%. - Gross margin figures across the same set ranged from 30% to 65%. - Of 29 gross margin figures, 28 named no source. - The one sourced gross margin figure cited an in-house expert rather than a study. - The benchmark that appeared most often was tied to a 2024 financial benchmarking study from the Air Conditioning Contractors of America. - The ACCA survey page checked directly in September 2026 offered members access to the 2021 report and invited non-members to purchase it. - No 2024 study appeared on that page. - One ranking page labeled its own figure as “2024 ACCA benchmarking, secondary,” indicating the number came second-hand rather than directly from the study. - Kamyar Shah, the fractional COO who ran the audit, said one of the 26 retrieved pages was published by his own company and repeated the same 2024 attribution without verification. - Shah said the page was counted in the figures like every other page.

Between the lines: - The audit argues the problem is structural, not necessarily intentional. - Residential HVAC is largely private, small-business driven, and not subject to mandatory financial disclosure. - That makes external benchmarking easy to repeat and hard to verify. - Shah said the risk is that unsourced figures enter decisions that affect compensation, pricing, and acquisitions. - He warned that a commission plan built on a mismatched benchmark can function like a pay cut and push away high-performing technicians. - The audit does not accuse ACCA of misconduct. - Instead, it faults the downstream use of a year and benchmark that pages repeat without verification.

What's next: - The study recommends internal measurement over borrowed benchmarks. - It advises measuring gross margin by job type instead of in aggregate. - It also recommends tracking the same metric monthly for two quarters before making changes. - The study says every metric should have a one-sentence definition that states what counts and what does not. - The cached pages and extracted claim set are retained so each figure can be traced back to its source page. - The full study is available at the full study. - More information is available on Kamyar Shah's site and his name page. - Contact information appears at World Consulting Group contact. - Shah also lists profiles on LinkedIn, Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, and X.

The bottom line: - Most HVAC profit benchmarks circulating online in this audit had no source, and the most repeated benchmark appears to rely on a citation that does not match the underlying ACCA page.