US HVAC roll-up, mapped
The largest HVAC companies in the US now run over 12,000 locations. They are all owned by private equity.
Updated June 8, 2026
Ten private-equity platforms hold about 12,000 of the 167,717 tracked US HVAC contractor locations, under 8 percent of the market. The other 155,000 are still independent.
locations under the top 10 platforms
itracked US HVAC contractors
iUS HVAC services industry
The top ten platforms
The largest HVAC companies, by US locations.
All ten are owned by private equity. The fund, not the trade name, is the buyer.
US location counts are approximate, from public disclosures, trade-press reporting, and the Orbital contractor map. Full per-platform notes are in the accordion below. See the universe at /data/hvac/.
Who buys this data
Who sells into HVAC, by category.
This page is for the teams selling into HVAC, not the contractors. The buyer for the dataset usually falls into one of these.
The long version
Detail, on demand.
- Start with every active US HVAC contractor. The Orbital data team maintains a tracked universe of 167,717 HVAC companies across 50 states and 44 metros, refreshed continuously from site-level signals, dealer networks, and corporate filings.
- Resolve each contractor to a parent. If the trade name is Joe's Heating and Air but the LLC is a subsidiary of Apex Service Partners or Wrench Group, we capture both. The local owner often stays on after the sale, so the contact is real even when the cap table changed.
- Track the deal flow. Most HVAC roll-up transactions never make business-press headlines. They show up in state corporate filings, in equipment-dealer reassignments, and in quiet brand changes on the truck. We watch all three.
- Find the owner who still answers the phone. Around 90 percent of US HVAC contractors are independent. Most of those owners are between 55 and 70, have no internal succession plan, and are the most prospected demographic in the trades. We find them by name, with a verified email and a direct dial.
- Refresh on a rolling schedule. Site-level signals run continuously against the Orbital universe of US small businesses, so closures and acquisitions land in the dataset weeks after they happen, not in a yearly report.
| # | Platform | US locations | Parent PE owner and notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Apex Service Partners | ~2,400 | Owned by Alpine Investors. The fastest-growing HVAC and plumbing roll-up of the past five years. Acquired more than 150 home-services brands. Operating model leaves the local trade name on the truck. |
| 2 | Wrench Group | ~1,800 | Owned by Leonard Green and Partners after acquiring from Investcorp in 2022. Houses well-known regional brands including Coolray, Hobson Heating and Air, and Parker and Sons. Concentrated in the Sun Belt. |
| 3 | ARS / Rescue Rooter | ~1,400 | Operates as American Home Services. Owned by American Securities. One of the longest-running multi-state HVAC and plumbing operators, with sites in more than 25 states. |
| 4 | Service Experts | ~1,200 | Owned by Morgan Stanley Capital Partners after Enercare divested. Around 100 branches across the US and Canada. Heavy commercial mix alongside residential service. |
| 5 | Authority Brands | ~1,100 | Owned by Apax Partners. Parent of One Hour Heating and Air, Benjamin Franklin Plumbing, Mister Sparky, and Mosquito Squad. Franchise-heavy model alongside corporate-owned units. |
| 6 | One Hour Heating and Air | ~900 | Sits inside Authority Brands but operates as a distinct national franchise. Listed separately because the franchisee is the buyer for most vendor pitches, not the parent. |
| 7 | Aire Serv | ~800 | Part of Neighborly, owned by KKR. National HVAC franchise with concentration in the Midwest and Southeast. Franchisees are independent business owners on a royalty model. |
| 8 | Southern Home Services | ~700 | Owned by Bain Capital. Built through acquisition of regional HVAC and plumbing leaders across the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic since 2021. |
| 9 | Sila Services | ~900 | Owned by Harvest Partners. Multi-brand HVAC, plumbing, and electrical platform spanning the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Southeast. |
| 10 | Redwood Services | ~800 | Owned by Alpine Investors, the same firm behind Apex. Different operating thesis: keeps acquired brands stand-alone with operator-led leadership rather than a single integrated platform. |
Counts marked "~" are approximate. Roll-up activity moves these numbers month to month. The parent PE owner is the cap-table owner; the operating company often keeps the founding family in a leadership role for several years after the sale.
The five largest states carry roughly 35 percent of US HVAC contractors. Per capita, the Sun Belt dominates: year-round cooling load means more trucks per resident than in northern states.
| # | State | HVAC contractors | Per 100k residents |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Texas | 13,800 | 45 |
| 2 | California | 12,600 | 32 |
| 3 | Florida | 10,900 | 47 |
| 4 | New York | 6,200 | 31 |
| 5 | Pennsylvania | 5,100 | 39 |
| 6 | Illinois | 4,800 | 38 |
| 7 | Ohio | 4,600 | 39 |
| 8 | North Carolina | 4,500 | 42 |
| 9 | Georgia | 4,300 | 39 |
| 10 | Arizona | 3,700 | 49 |
| 11 | Michigan | 3,500 | 35 |
| 12 | Virginia | 3,300 | 38 |
| 13 | Tennessee | 3,100 | 43 |
| 14 | New Jersey | 3,000 | 32 |
| 15 | Indiana | 2,700 | 39 |
Counts rounded to the nearest hundred for display. The dataset itself is exact, down to the LLC name and trade brand.
We believe
If you sell into HVAC and your CRM is sorted by trade name, you cannot see the deal.
The standard vendor motion in HVAC has not caught up to the cap table. A field-service software rep walks into a Coolray branch in Atlanta and pitches the local GM. The local GM does not buy software anymore. Wrench Group buys software for Coolray, and Leonard Green signs off on the line item. That is three levels of org chart that did not exist five years ago, and most vendor data tools index by the trade name on the truck, which is the level that has the least authority.
A founder we talked to last quarter sold his Phoenix-area HVAC company to one of the roll-ups in 2022. Two years and 40 acquisitions later, he runs a regional segment with 600 trucks. He told us his inbound vendor pitches still come addressed to his old four-truck LLC, by name, asking if he wants a free demo. The same vendors are not pitching to the parent at all, because the parent is not in their database. Meanwhile, the 155,000-plus independents that have not sold yet, the ones the PE buyers are racing each other to find, are sitting underused in everyone else's outbound. That is the list that matters in this market for the next three years.
Field-service management software. ServiceTitan, FieldEdge, Housecall Pro, Jobber, and the next wave of vertical SaaS selling dispatch, invoicing, and call center to independent HVAC contractors. The largest single buyer category in the trades.
Equipment distribution. Carrier, Trane, Lennox, Goodman, Daikin, and their dealer-channel teams. The roll-ups have started negotiating equipment directly with manufacturers; the independent dealer relationship is still where the volume is.
Parts wholesalers. Watsco, Johnstone Supply, Ferguson HVAC, and regional supply houses. Same dynamic as equipment: the long tail of independents is where the daily counter sales happen.
Consumer financing platforms. Sunlight Financial, Service Finance, GreenSky, and others selling point-of-sale financing for high-ticket equipment replacements. The contractor signs the financing partnership; the homeowner uses it.
Lead generation and marketing. HomeAdvisor, Angi, Networx, Thumbtack, and the local-SEO agencies. HVAC has one of the highest cost-per-lead figures in home services, often $80 to $300 per booked appointment.
Training and certification. NATE, RSES, and manufacturer-specific certification programs. The HVAC workforce shortage is structural, so anyone who certifies technicians has a live prospect list inside this dataset.
Private equity buyers. The roll-up firms themselves. Alpine, Leonard Green, Bain, Harvest, Apax, and a dozen smaller mid-market funds use this dataset the same way the software vendors do, with a different ask at the end of the call.
Adjacent universes built the same way: the HVAC owner email list, the contractor email list, and the broader by-industry email lists.
You only sell into the platforms. If your motion is one annual contract with Apex and one with Wrench Group, you do not need 167,717 records. You need a dozen names at the parent level. Save your budget.
You sell to homeowners, not contractors. Consumer-side HVAC products, replacement aggregators, and homeowner-direct equipment marketplaces have a different shape and a different buyer. The data here is operator-side, not consumer-side.
You need equipment manufacturer data. Carrier, Trane, Lennox, Goodman, and the rest of the OEMs are not in this dataset as buyers. They are the suppliers our buyers buy from. Different list, different motion.
You are looking for HVAC permit or inspection data. County and city permit records are public but messy. We do not stand them up here. The decision-maker contact is what we build.
If you Google "largest HVAC companies in the US," you get a mix of trade-press listicles and consultancy decks that round the answer to the brand. Where the public lists fall short is the cap table. Most of them list the operating brand and skip the parent PE owner entirely, which is the level at which buying decisions for software, equipment financing, and national accounts now happen.
The next problem is freshness. The roll-up doing 200 to 300 transactions a year means a top-50 list published in March is wrong by July. Wrench Group alone has acquired more than 30 regional brands in the past three years. Apex Service Partners has acquired more than 150. The trade-press lists treat each acquired brand as a stand-alone company, so the same trucks get counted twice. We track the parent, the brand, and the local LLC separately so the dataset reflects what shows up on the invoice.
The third problem is the long tail. Roughly 155,000 of the tracked US HVAC contractors are independent. Most never appear in any top-50 list because they have one to five trucks and a website that runs on Wix. They are also the most prospected demographic in the trades. The PE firms want them as targets. The software vendors want them as accounts. The financing platforms want them as referral partners.
This is exactly the gap Orbital was built for. We map the universe of US small and mid-market businesses, find the owner of each one, and validate the contact before it reaches you. What is specific to HVAC is the layer on top: service mix, equipment-dealer affiliation, location count, and whether the contractor sits under a roll-up parent or still answers to the founding family. The full directory lives at /data/hvac/.
Questions
Before you ask sales about the HVAC dataset.
What are the largest HVAC companies in the US?
The ten largest HVAC platforms in the US are Apex Service Partners, Wrench Group, ARS/Rescue Rooter, Service Experts, Authority Brands, One Hour Heating and Air Conditioning, Aire Serv, Southern Home Services, Sila Services, and Redwood Services. Together they run over 12,000 locations. All ten are owned by private equity. They sit inside a tracked universe of 167,717 US HVAC contractors (see the full HVAC directory), so even rolled up the top ten hold under 8 percent of the market.
Who owns the biggest HVAC companies in the US?
Private equity. Alpine Investors owns Apex Service Partners and Redwood Services. Leonard Green and Partners owns Wrench Group. American Securities owns ARS/Rescue Rooter through American Home Services. Morgan Stanley Capital Partners owns Service Experts. Apax Partners owns Authority Brands. Harvest Partners owns Sila Services. The brand on the truck is rarely the owner. The owner is a fund in New York, Boston, or San Francisco.
How many HVAC contractors are there in the US?
Orbital tracks 167,717 active HVAC contractor establishments across all 50 states and 44 metros. Roughly 90 percent are independent operators with one to five trucks. The roll-up era has bought up the largest 12,000 or so locations. The remaining 155,000-plus contractors are the long tail that most field-service software, parts wholesalers, and lead-gen platforms are actually trying to reach.
How big is the US HVAC industry?
Roughly 150 billion dollars in annual revenue across HVAC contracting and services. That spans residential install and repair, commercial mechanical, and the parts and equipment distribution that feeds both. Equipment manufacturing through Carrier, Trane, Lennox, and Goodman is separate, and adds tens of billions more.
Is the HVAC industry being consolidated by private equity?
Yes, and the wave is roughly half complete. Since 2018, PE has assembled platforms by buying up successful family-run HVAC companies, layering on franchise brands, and rolling them into multi-state operators. The ten largest platforms now run more than 12,000 locations combined. Industry sources track 200 to 300 transactions per year. Most owners selling are between 55 and 70 and have no internal succession plan.
Which states have the most HVAC contractors?
Texas, California, Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania have the largest contractor populations, driven by population, climate, and housing stock. Per capita, the picture flips in the Sun Belt, where year-round cooling load means more contractors per resident than in northern states with shorter cooling seasons.
Who buys data on the largest HVAC companies?
Vendors selling into the HVAC trade. Field-service software like ServiceTitan, FieldEdge, and Housecall Pro. Equipment distributors and parts wholesalers. Consumer financing platforms. Lead-gen networks. Training and certification bodies. The private equity firms doing the roll-up themselves, who need a working list of the independents that have not sold yet. The common thread is needing the owner and the parent, not the trade name on the door.
Can I filter the HVAC contractor data by state or PE owner?
Yes. The dataset supports filtering by state, metro, service mix (residential, commercial, refrigeration), location count, and parent ownership when the contractor sits under a roll-up platform. Tell us the segment you want and we send a sample of around 100 verified owner records before anything changes hands.
See the HVAC contractor dataset before you pay for it.
Tell us the states, service mix, or parent platforms you want. We send a free sample of around 100 verified owner records you can check against your own pipeline, no commitment, no email-list back-and-forth.
Get the sample