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Short Answer Most HVAC maintenance plans cost $150 to $500 a year, usually billed monthly. That typically buys one or two tune-ups plus repair discounts and priority scheduling, not free repairs. A&E’s Comfort Club is $168 a year if your home only has heat, like a furnace, which gets one tune-up each fall. It’s $336 a year if you heat and cool, like a heat pump or a furnace with AC, which gets a tune-up in the fall and another in the spring. A plan usually pays off when you heat and cool your home, because you’d need both visits anyway. |
You probably got the pitch at the end of a service call. The tech was friendly, the furnace is running again, and now there's a clipboard asking if you want to "join the club" for a monthly fee. Is that a good deal, or a gym membership for your furnace?
We've been servicing heating and cooling systems across the Columbia River Gorge and the Portland metro for over 17 years, and we sell a maintenance plan of our own, the Comfort Club. So take this article knowing we have skin in the game, and judge us on whether we tell you when a plan isn't worth it.
Pricing a plan comes down to how many systems and visits it covers, what's bundled in, and the fine print. We'll walk through each, show you exactly what ours costs, and do the math on when a plan pays for itself.
Nationally, HVAC maintenance plans run about $150 to $500 per year, and most companies split that into a monthly payment of roughly $13 to $42.
Cost-guide site Fixr puts annual plans in the $150 to $500 range, and HVAC.com cites the same spread in its guide to maintenance agreements. For comparison, a single tune-up without a plan usually costs $70 to $200 for a central AC and $70 to $300 for a furnace, according to Fixr.
Where a plan lands in that range depends on what's packed into it:
The biggest price driver is how many visits and systems a plan covers, because every visit is a technician’s time in your home.
A furnace only needs a fall check, so one visit a year covers it. A heat pump heats in winter and cools in summer, so it needs a check before each season, which doubles the labor. Ductless mini-splits are priced by zone. A zone is one indoor unit, the wall-mounted head in a room, so a house with heads in the living room and two bedrooms has three zones, and each one needs its own cleaning and check. At A&E, each added zone adds $75 a year.
Plans also cost more when they bundle extras like extended warranties, remote monitoring, or generator and plumbing service under one membership. Some of those work like insurance. If your system is older and you’ve been calling for repairs every winter, a plan with a good repair discount can pay for itself in one bad January. But some expensive plans are mostly perks that sound good and rarely get used. Before you sign, ask how many visits you get, whether the discount covers parts, labor or both, and whether any warranty ends when you cancel.
Distance matters too, especially in the Gorge. A&E’s diagnostic fee runs from $135 to $325 depending on where you live, because a call to an outlying town like Goldendale or Maupin can take a technician off the schedule for half a day or more, between the round-trip drive and the visit itself.
Fewer visits, fewer systems and fewer extras bring the price down, but a rock-bottom plan or “tune-up special” is often priced to get a technician into your home to find something to sell you.
If you only have a gas furnace and no central AC, you only need one visit a year, and skipping add-ons like monitoring on a simple system keeps the cost down.
Not every low price is a trap. Some companies run lean, and seasonal promotions are real (we run them too). But if the visit loses money, the company has to make it back somewhere. Watch for a 20-minute look-over with no measurements, a long list of “urgent” repairs on a system that ran fine yesterday, and plans that jump in price after year one.
A real tune-up includes measurements; a quick look isn’t a tune-up. Our technicians test refrigerant pressures, check amp draws on motors, inspect coils, tighten electrical connections, inspect burners and the accessible parts of the heat exchanger, flush condensate lines, and test airflow and the thermostat. A visit takes about 60 to 90 minutes. If yours took 15, ask what was skipped. You can see the full checklist on our maintenance services page.
One cost no plan cuts for you: filters. ENERGY STAR’s Heating & Cooling Maintenance Checklist says to inspect, clean, or change your air filter once a month, because a dirty filter raises energy costs and can lead to early equipment failure. That’s on you between visits, plan or no plan.
The Comfort Club costs $168 a year for a heat-only system, $336 a year for heating and cooling, and $168 to $468 a year for ductless mini-splits, which puts every tier inside the national range.
|
Comfort Club plan |
Visits per year |
Price per year |
About per month |
|
Heat only (furnace or heating-only system) |
1 |
$168 |
$14 |
|
Heat and cool (heat pump, or furnace plus AC) |
2 |
$336 |
$28 |
|
Ductless mini-split, 1 zone (1 indoor unit) |
1 |
$168 |
$14 |
|
Ductless mini-split, 2 zones (2 indoor units) |
1 |
$243 |
$20.25 |
|
Ductless mini-split, 3 zones (3 indoor units) |
1 |
$318 |
$26.50 |
|
Ductless mini-split, 4 zones (4 indoor units) |
1 |
$393 |
$32.75 |
|
Ductless mini-split, 5 zones (5 indoor units) |
1 |
$468 |
$39 |
Every tier includes these member benefits, straight from our published terms:
Add-ons, if you want them: HVAC monitoring runs $10 a month and alerts us when your thermostat throws an error code, and generator maintenance is $336 a year for one visit. The VIP Whole Home plan, which bundles the Comfort Club with monitoring, plumbing, and generator memberships, is $79.83 a month.
Michael C., an A&E customer, has been in the Comfort Club for five years and called it "a great preventative maintenance deal" in his review. He's the kind of homeowner the plan fits: someone who wants the visits handled without thinking about it.
The fine print matters as much as the price, so here it is in plain English.
It’s not a home warranty. Repairs are still billed, at the member discount. The only warranty piece is the extended labor and parts coverage on systems A&E installed.
Get it in writing. The usual surprises with any company’s plan are repairs, cleaning and price increases at renewal, so ask for exclusions and renewal terms in writing. At A&E, you get a flat-rate price before any repair starts.
A plan pays off when you'd book two tune-ups a year anyway, or when you need even one repair.
Here's the rough math:
|
Scenario |
Without a plan |
With the Comfort Club |
|
Heat and cool: two tune-ups, no repairs |
$396 (two A&E tune-ups at $198) |
$336, both visits included |
|
Heat and cool: two tune-ups plus one typical repair (A&E's published range: 300–550) |
Tune-ups + full repair price + diagnostic fee (135–325 at A&E) |
$336 + %15 repair parts |
|
Heat only: one tune-up (furnace, no AC) |
$198 |
$168, visit included |
Even with only a furnace, our $168 heat-only plan costs $30 less than one standalone A&E tune-up at $198, and you get 15% off parts if something needs fixing. The plan only stops making sense if you’d rather shop around each year for a cheaper one-time tune-up somewhere else, or you’re selling soon. If you won't, paying per visit is fine, and we'd rather tell you that than sell you a plan you'll resent.
The bigger savings are harder to put on a receipt. According to Energy Star, airflow problems alone can cut a system’s efficiency by up to 15%, and dirty coils make it run longer to do the same job. That shows up on your Pacific Power or PGE bill every month. Small problems caught in October are also cheaper than the same problem at 2 a.m. in January: in our post on emergency HVAC repair costs, we put typical daytime repairs at $300 to $550 and emergency calls at $600 to $1,100.
A plan is a good fit if you:
A plan is probably not worth it if you:
In the Gorge, a heat pump works hard in both directions, which is exactly the setup where a two-visit plan earns its price.
In The Dalles, summer heat east of the Cascades keeps a heat pump running hard for weeks, then the same equipment heats through cold, windy winters. Hood River, Cascade Locks, White Salmon, and Goldendale homeowners deal with the Gorge wind pushing leaves and grit against outdoor units. Dirty coils make a system run longer, and a fall visit is a good time to clean off what the wind left behind. Down in Gresham and Troutdale, the swing between seasons is milder, so if you only run a furnace, the $168 heat-only plan or a single standalone visit may be all you need.
If you're not sure which category your home falls in, we'll look at your system and tell you honestly. Start with our The Dalles service page or Gresham service page, or schedule a maintenance visit and ask the tech whether a plan makes sense for your setup.
Most HVAC maintenance plans cost $150 to $500 a year, and our Comfort Club runs $168 for heat-only and $336 for heating and cooling. Price follows the number of systems, visits, and bundled extras, and cheap plans often make their money on the repairs they find. The plan is worth it when you'd pay for two tune-ups anyway, when your system is aging, or when you want an extended labor warranty on equipment we installed. It's not worth it for a single furnace in a house you're about to sell.
We've maintained heat pumps, furnaces, and ductless systems from The Dalles to Gresham for over 17 years, and we'd rather lose a membership sale than sign you up for something that doesn't fit.
Your next read: How to Beat the Cost of an Emergency HVAC Repair. It shows what a skipped tune-up can turn into when something fails on the coldest night of the year, which is the cost a plan is really protecting you from.
Ready to get your system checked before winter? Schedule a maintenance visit or call (541) 387-3311 in the Gorge or (503) 618-9646 in Gresham. A&E maintains furnaces, heat pumps, air conditioners and ductless systems in Hood River, The Dalles, Cascade Locks, White Salmon, Goldendale, Gresham, Troutdale and the Portland metro.
It can be, mainly for warranty reasons. Many manufacturers require proof of regular professional maintenance to honor their parts warranty, and a plan creates that record automatically. If A&E installed the system, the Comfort Club also extends your labor warranty to five years while you stay a member.
Usually not. Most plans, including ours, cover scheduled tune-ups and give you a discount on repairs and parts, but the repair itself is still billed. If you want repair coverage, you're looking at a home warranty or an extended equipment warranty, which is a different product.
At A&E, a single tune-up without a plan is $198, while the heat-only Comfort Club is $168 a year and includes that visit. Nationally, Fixr puts a single tune-up at $70 to $200 for an AC and $70 to $300 for a furnace. Heat pumps usually need two visits a year, so the annual cost roughly doubles
It depends on the company. HVAC.com notes that some plans transfer when you move, but A&E's Comfort Club does not, and canceling within the first year can trigger a discount payback. If you're selling soon, skip the plan and book a single pre-listing tune-up instead.
No. Monitoring watches for thermostat error codes between visits so a problem gets flagged early, but it can't flush a drain line or measure refrigerant pressure. At A&E, monitoring is a $10-a-month add-on to the Comfort Club, not a substitute for the visits.
ENERGY STAR recommends a professional pre-season checkup every year: the cooling system in spring and the heating system in fall. Heat pumps and furnace-plus-AC homes get the most from two visits, one before each season. Ductless mini-splits at A&E get one visit a year, priced by the number of zones.