What is Maintenance agreement?

A maintenance agreement in plain English

Think of it as a standing appointment the customer has already paid for. Instead of waiting for a furnace to fail in January, the homeowner signs up once, and the contractor comes back on a schedule to clean, test and adjust the equipment.

Example: a homeowner with a gas furnace and a central air conditioner signs a 12-month agreement for $18 a month. It includes a cooling visit in April, a heating visit in October, 15% off repairs and no trip charge on member calls. The contractor gets $216 of planned revenue and two booked visits in what would otherwise be shoulder-season weeks.

The agreement does three jobs at once:

• For the customer, it buys upkeep and a set of perks at a known price.
• For the contractor, it fills slow weeks with scheduled work and keeps the customer in contact with your company, not a competitor, when something breaks.
• For the equipment, it means someone checks it every season, which is what manufacturers and ENERGY STAR recommend.¹

What does a maintenance agreement cover?

The scope is whatever the contract says, so write it down. Most residential agreements in the trades cover the same building blocks:

For HVAC, the industry reference for what a maintenance visit should include is ANSI/ACCA 4 QM, Maintenance of Residential HVAC Systems, a set of minimum inspection tasks that ANSI reaffirmed in August 2024.² Building your visit checklist from it gives every tech the same baseline and gives the customer something concrete to compare.

Maintenance agreement vs warranty vs membership

These three get mixed up at the kitchen table. The differences matter for what you promise and what you owe.

Many shops use "agreement" and "membership" for the same product. The membership page covers the club side: perks, pricing on estimates and selling it on the job.

What are the rules for auto-renewing agreements?

Most agreements renew automatically, which is where the legal risk sits.

Federal. The Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act (ROSCA) covers recurring charges sold over the internet. The seller must clearly disclose all material terms before taking billing details, get the customer's express informed consent before charging, and provide a simple way to stop recurring charges.³

The FTC click-to-cancel rule is not in force. The FTC's broader negative option rule was vacated by the Eighth Circuit on July 8, 2025, days before enforcement was to start, because of procedural defects in the rulemaking.⁴ ROSCA itself still applies.

States. Several states have their own automatic renewal laws. California's, in Business and Professions Code section 17602, sets disclosure, consent and cancellation requirements for automatic renewal offers to California consumers.⁵ If you sell in more than one state, have someone check each one.

How to set one up

1. 1

   Write the visit task list first

   Decide exactly what each visit includes before you price it. The task list drives labor time, and labor time drives price.

2. 2

   Price from your own costs

   Estimate labor minutes per visit, drive time and materials, then add your margin. The perks you discount are a cost too.

3. 3

   Put the terms in writing

   Equipment covered, visits, price, billing schedule, term, renewal, cancellation and refund. Get a signature or recorded consent.

4. 4

   Bill on a card on file

   Agreements that depend on someone remembering to pay lapse quietly. Autopay with failed-card retries keeps them alive.

5. 5

   Book visits before the season

   Pull a list of visits due each month and schedule them in bulk, before the phones get busy.

How do you measure a maintenance agreement program?

Count agreements in force, but judge the program on whether customers stay and whether the visits happen. The numbers that matter each have their own page:

• Renewal rate: agreements renewed out of those that came due.
• Churn: members lost in a period, voluntary and involuntary.
• Membership conversion rate: how often eligible customers sign up.
• Recurring monthly revenue: what the agreements bill each month.

The HVAC maintenance plans guide walks through plan design and pricing in detail.

Maintenance agreements in TradesWork

In TradesWork, agreements are set up as membership plans. Each plan has a price (monthly, yearly or paid once), a length from 1 to 60 months, a repair discount, auto-renew on or off, and up to 12 included visits, each due in named months or every N months with its own job type. A daily renewal run renews auto-renew plans with a new term and visits and expires the rest, and canceling requires a written reason. See memberships for how billing, card retries and visits due work.