HVAC Zero-Dollar Tickets: Where the $0 Visits Come From

What share of HVAC tickets should be zero-dollar?

There is no published answer to check against. As of October 2026, we found no figure from a government agency, a university or a named publisher’s own survey for what share of an HVAC company’s completed jobs should close at $0.

A federally funded study suggests why the number is hard to come by. In a report for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Building America program, published in July 2024, researchers at Southface Energy Institute asked eight HVAC contractor companies for basic counts — service calls, travel and labor time per call, callbacks on new installs. They wrote that the companies, even though they used business management software, were unable or unwilling to provide them, and concluded that the industry needs better use of that software and of performance metrics.

So the useful comparison is the shop against itself. ServiceTitan’s help center lists Zero Dollar Jobs and Zero Dollar Jobs Percentage among the columns its Business Unit Performance report template can add, next to Recall Jobs, Warranty Jobs and No Charge Jobs, and names comparing the percentage of zero dollar jobs across business units as an example use. Run it for the last full quarter and for the same quarter a year earlier; the year-earlier figure is the closest thing to a benchmark the shop has, because it was counted the same way in the same season. In other platforms, the export in the next section gives both counts. A diagnostic-only ticket is not a $0 job, so it needs the second list described there.

How to pull every zero-dollar ticket in one afternoon

The list already exists; it only has to be asked for. In ServiceTitan, a job report filtered to completed jobs for one recent quarter, with the invoice subtotal in a column, gives the raw list. In other platforms, the same steps work on any job list or export that carries the invoice total.

Pull two lists, not one. The first is every completed job with a $0 subtotal. The second is every job above zero but below the sold threshold — in ServiceTitan, the job-type setting that decides when a job counts as converted. Its help center suggests setting that threshold at least $1 above the dispatch fee, which means the second list is, in practice, the diagnostic-only tickets: the truck ran, the fee was collected, and nothing else was sold.

• Job number, date, location and customer
• Job type and business unit
• Technician (and, for recalls, the original job it links to)
• Invoice subtotal, and any line that lowers it, such as a credit or a waived fee
• Hours on the job from the timesheet, and parts used
• Membership on the location, and any tags or summary notes

Those columns are enough to sort each line by hand. A quarter is the right window: long enough to include more than one week of weather, short enough that the tech who ran the call still remembers it when someone asks.

Five causes, five owners

Sort every line into one of five piles. The point is not the total; it is that each pile belongs to a different person, and a zero-dollar count handed to the whole team belongs to nobody.

• Diagnostic credited toward the repair. The fee was applied to a repair sold on the same visit or a follow-up job. The money moved rather than vanished — check that the repair invoice actually carries it. Owner: whoever writes the pricebook rule for credits.
• Warranty. Equipment failed while still under warranty. The visit is a designed zero; the open question is whether anything claimable was claimed and whether the paperwork reached the office. Owner: the person who files warranty claims.
• Callback. A second trip to fix the first one, whether or not it was booked as a recall. The labor, the truck and the slot are real costs with no revenue against them. Owner: the service manager, who records the cause.
• Unbilled extra or waived fee. The tech did work or waived a charge on site and no line made it onto the invoice, or the reason was never written down. This is the pile that is pure leak. Owner: the service manager for the habit, the office for the invoice review before the job closes.
• Membership visit. A tune-up included in a plan the customer already pays for. Designed, and not a leak in itself — but check that the visit was due, that it was the plan’s visit and not an extra one, and whether anything it found went on to an estimate. Owner: whoever runs the membership list.

Two smaller piles can turn up in an honest sort: data errors (a duplicate job, a canceled call marked complete, an invoice raised on a different job number) and genuine goodwill the owner chose to give. Name them, count them, and keep them out of the leak total. A goodwill visit with a written reason is a decision; the same visit with no reason is a guess.

Why the zero-dollar count hides from the usual reports

The two kinds of zero behave differently in the numbers, which is why a shop can watch its scorecards every week and still not see the pile.

ServiceTitan treats every maintenance, service and install job as an opportunity unless it is marked No Charge. So a diagnostic-only ticket below the sold threshold counts as an opportunity that did not convert, and it pulls the tech’s conversion rate down — visible, if someone is looking. A recall or warranty job is the opposite. The help center says plainly that, like other No Charge, Non-Convertible jobs, recall and warranty jobs do not affect technician conversion rates. They are invisible to the scorecard by design.

That design is sensible for coaching a tech’s selling, and it is exactly why callbacks go unpriced. And a second visit that should have been booked as a recall but was booked as a regular service call at $0 lands in neither place cleanly: it drags down a conversion rate for the wrong reason and never shows up as a recall at all. The only way to see all of it is the plain list of $0 jobs, sorted by hand.

What a zero-dollar ticket costs: a worked count

A $0 ticket still spends money: a technician’s hours, a truck’s miles and a slot on the board that a paid call could have filled. Three public figures frame that spending, though none of them is this shop’s number. In May 2025 the median HVAC mechanic or installer earned $29.33 an hour, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Outlook Handbook. The same agency’s Employer Costs for Employee Compensation table for June 2026 puts benefits at 31.4 percent of what private employers spend on installation, maintenance and repair workers, which is why an hourly wage understates what an hour of a tech’s time costs. For miles, the IRS business standard mileage rate from July through December 2026 is 76 cents; that rate exists for tax deductions, so the shop’s own fuel, insurance and repair records give the truer figure.

Illustrative example, with made-up inputs: a shop sorts one quarter and finds 60 tickets in the two leak piles — callbacks and unbilled extras. Say each ticket took two hours of a tech’s time including the drive, which payroll puts at $50 an hour once taxes and benefits are added; ran 25 miles, which the shop’s vehicle records put at 70 cents a mile; and used $30 of parts. Per ticket that is $100 of labor, $17.50 of driving and $30 of parts, about $148 in all, or $8,850 across the 60 tickets, before counting the paid calls those slots could have run. Swap in the shop’s own hours, rates and parts, and the same three lines give its real figure.

The slot is the cost that is easiest to miss. In peak season, the hours a tech spends on a $0 visit are hours not spent on a demand call that would have been paid. The same BLS handbook page says these technicians sometimes work overtime or irregular schedules in the peak heating and cooling seasons, so a $0 visit in those weeks uses time the shop is already short of.

Fixing each pile without making the techs the problem

The fixes are mostly rules and hand-offs, and each one is small.

• Write the diagnostic-credit rule down: when the fee is credited, for how long, and that the credit appears as a line on the repair invoice so the money can be traced.
• Give warranty claims a named owner and a weekly check of warranty jobs against claims filed.
• Book every return visit to a recent job as a recall, linked to the original, with a cause recorded — then price the recall list monthly.
• Require a reason code for any fee waived on site, and have the office review $0 invoices before the job closes, not after.
• Check membership visits against the plan schedule, and send anything the visit found to the estimate follow-up list.

None of it calls for new software, only the list pulled on a schedule and each pile handed to its owner. A shop that does this every month will know its own baseline within a quarter, which is more useful than any average printed online.

When the zero-dollar count is not worth chasing

Sometimes the honest finding is that there is nothing to fix. If the sort shows the $0 tickets are almost all membership visits and documented warranty work, the zeros are doing what they were designed to do. If the shop deliberately waives diagnostic fees as marketing and the follow-on repairs pay for them, that is a pricing decision, not a leak. And for a small shop with one or two trucks, an afternoon with the list and a pencil is the whole job; no outside help is needed.

Outside help earns its place when the $0 tickets are one symptom among several — callbacks no one prices, finished jobs waiting to be invoiced, estimates left open. The Revenue Self-Audit gives a verdict on all six hand-offs from thirteen questions answered from memory. The Revenue Review works for two weeks from read-only access to the shop’s field-service records; its written report prices each leak found, puts the fixes in order, and says plainly when the records show nothing worth pursuing. Whether it fits at all is what the free 20-minute call is for.