Heating, cooling and hot water are the easiest jobs on this site to price honestly, because the federal government already does most of the work. The US Energy Information Administration publishes installed costs for residential equipment across the whole efficiency range, and those figures sit behind our hvac replacement and water heater replacement guides.

A full furnace-plus-air-conditioner replacement runs around $11,785 nationally. A standard gas storage water heater runs about $1,382, with the usual range landing between $841 to $1,922.

The equipment is the easy part

A three-ton condenser is a catalogue item. It costs what it costs, give or take a distributor relationship, anywhere in the country. Producer prices for air conditioning and refrigeration equipment have risen +4.6% in the twelve months to July 2026, and for domestic water heaters they have risen +0.7% in the twelve months to May 2026 — real movement, but slow and visible.

What is not a catalogue item is the two days a crew spends in your house. On our numbers, about a third of an HVAC replacement is on-site labour and a little under half of a water heater swap is. That is why the same equipment lands at different totals in different cities: construction labour runs $45.42 an hour around San Jose, CA and $20.60 an hour around Gadsden, AL.

The four things that actually move an HVAC quote

  • Whether the ductwork survives. Reusing existing ducts is the assumption in most quotes. Replacing them is close to a different job, and it is the single biggest swing factor.
  • Fuel or configuration changes. Moving from a furnace to a heat pump, or shifting where the unit lives, brings in electrical work, venting or gas line changes that were not in the original scope.
  • Efficiency tier. The gap between a standard unit and a high-efficiency one is real but narrower than it is usually sold as. Our HVAC range spans exactly that gap and nothing else — which is why it is unusually tight, and why real quotes can fall outside it.
  • Sizing. An oversized system costs more to buy and runs worse. A contractor who sizes by square footage alone rather than by a load calculation is guessing.

Water heaters: the type decides almost everything

Here the federal data is unusually good, because EIA prices each heater type separately. That means the multipliers on our calculator are not assumptions — they are one published cost divided by another. An electric tank comes in below a gas tank; a tankless unit runs well above both; a heat pump unit sits between them.

The trap. A tankless unit quoted at "the same price" as a tank replacement almost always excludes the gas line upgrade or the electrical circuit it needs. Ask what the quote assumes about the supply before comparing it with anything.

A note on our HVAC range

Our band for HVAC spans the equipment tiers EIA publishes. It does not attempt to capture the variation between one contractor and the next, because no public dataset measures that. Treat it as a floor for what the hardware and a standard install should cost, not as a promise about the spread of quotes you will receive.