How many HVAC companies are there in the US? A state-by-state count (2026)

How many HVAC companies the government actually counts

There is no single federal registry of "HVAC companies." The closest the government gets is the Census Bureau's County Business Patterns (CBP) survey, which counts establishments by North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code from actual payroll tax filings. NAICS 238220, Plumbing, Heating, and Air-Conditioning Contractors, is the code that covers HVAC work — bundled together with plumbing, since the Census classification does not split the two.

In the 2023 CBP survey, the most recent year published, the United States had 111,207 active establishments under NAICS 238220 with at least one paid employee, employing 1,214,761 people combined. That counts locations, not legal companies — a business with three branches shows up as three establishments — and it leaves out sole owner-operators who carry no one on payroll.

Where they're concentrated

Establishment counts track population and climate demand more than anything else. California, Florida and Texas, the three largest states by population with real heating-and-cooling seasons, hold 27.0% of the national total between them. The ten largest states hold 53.0%.

Why online totals range from 110,000 to almost 500,000

Search for the same question online and the numbers scatter. Business-data vendors that sell lead lists and sales intelligence report far higher totals than the Census count, because they are counting something different: name-and-address listings pulled from directories, licensing boards and web crawls, not verified payroll employers.

Orbital's HVAC database reported 167,717 active U.S. HVAC companies as of October 2026, refreshed weekly from its own sourcing. companydata.com reported 476,874 as of its October 2, 2026 update. Neither publishes a methodology detailed enough to reconcile with the other, and the two vendor totals disagree with each other by nearly 3x — a sign that at least one, and probably both, count a meaningful number of sole proprietors, stale listings, or businesses that do not do HVAC work full time.

Treat the vendor totals as a rough order of magnitude for sales and marketing targeting, not an official count. The Census figure is the only one built from verified payroll filings; verify any vendor total on its own site before relying on it.

Most are small

HVAC and plumbing-HVAC contracting is a small-business trade. Nationally, 76.8% of establishments under NAICS 238220 have fewer than 10 employees. New Jersey (81.1%) and Massachusetts (80.3%) skew smaller still; North Carolina (74.2%) and Texas (76.4%) have a somewhat larger share of bigger shops, though even there most companies are small.

What this means for a small HVAC or plumbing-HVAC company

A company with fewer than 10 employees usually does not have a dedicated person answering phones. The people capable of answering a call — the owner, a lead tech, a dispatcher — are usually also the people on a roof or under a sink, so a no-heat call on a cold night or a burst pipe on a weekend often goes to voicemail.

That is a real cost in a trade where the first company to call back usually gets the job. We build Lead Friendly's AI receptionist for exactly this gap: it answers every call, triages genuine emergencies like no-heat and no-cool ahead of routine maintenance requests, books the visit, and follows up on open estimates, without adding a full-time front-desk hire. See current plans on the pricing page.

Methodology

• Establishment and employment counts: U.S. Census Bureau County Business Patterns, 2023 (the most recent year published), state-level file, NAICS 238220, legal form of organization "total." Downloaded October 9, 2026.
• Under-10-employee share: establishments in the 1–4 and 5–9 employee size classes (CBP's "n<5" and "n5_9" fields) divided by total establishments for each state.
• NAICS 238220 (Plumbing, Heating, and Air-Conditioning Contractors) bundles plumbing contractors in with HVAC/AC contractors; Census does not publish a code for HVAC alone, so these figures are a ceiling on "HVAC companies," not an exact count.
• Vendor totals (Orbital, companydata.com) are quoted as published on their own sites on the access date and are not independently verifiable; we did not attempt to reconcile their methodologies.