The firm counted every heating, ventilation and air conditioning listing in Texas in the open map data published by the Overture Maps Foundation, and sorted each one by whether it carries a local name or belongs to a national system. The counts below are of listings rather than companies, rounded to the nearest ten, and the method is set out at the end.

Nineteen in twenty carry a local name

Of about 6,560 listings, about 6,190 carry a local name. About 370 belong to a franchise system or a national company, and a good share of those are equipment and parts distributors that the map data files under the same category, rather than contractors. The share is the same, within a point or two, in every part of the state.

  • Houston area. About 1,840 listings, about 1,730 local.
  • Dallas and Fort Worth. About 1,870 listings, about 1,770 local.
  • San Antonio area. About 580 listings, about 550 local.
  • Austin area. About 540 listings, about 510 local.
  • Rest of Texas. About 1,730 listings, about 1,630 local.

Source: Overture Maps Foundation, Places, October 2026 release, open data under the CDLA Permissive 2.0 license. Areas are by ZIP code. Counts are the firm's, rounded to the nearest ten.

A local name is not local ownership

Residential heating and air conditioning has drawn steady private equity investment in recent years. Several platforms buy established local companies and keep the local name, the staff and the service agreements, because the name is much of what they are buying. A company counted here as local may already belong to a larger group, and the true independent share is lower than the map data shows.

For an owner, that means the likely buyers include those platforms as well as regional operators and individual buyers, and that a buyer is often paying for the name and the customer list as much as for the trucks.

What a buyer of an HVAC company looks at

  • Service agreements. Maintenance plans renewed each year are the most valued revenue in the trade, because they repeat.
  • The work mix. Residential against commercial, replacement against new construction, and how seasonal the year is.
  • The license. In Texas an air conditioning and refrigeration contractor license is held by a person, so who holds it, and whether that person stays after a sale, matters.
  • The technicians. How many, how long they have stayed, and how much of the work depends on the owner.
  • The fleet and the equipment. Their age, and what is owned outright.
  • The books. Revenue by line of work, gross margin, and statements a buyer can tie to the tax returns.

Most of these can be strengthened in the year or two before a sale. That preparation is the subject of the firm's valuation and exit readiness work.

How the count was made

The firm took every place in the October 2026 Overture Maps release whose primary category is an HVAC service, with an address in Texas, leaving out places marked permanently closed. A listing is counted as part of a national system when the map data links its brand to a known company, when six or more different Texas phone numbers share its name or its website, or when its name is that of a known national franchise. Everything else is counted as local.

Open map data counts listings, not companies. A company can be listed twice or once per location, a closed one can remain listed, and as the section above explains, a local name can belong to a company that has already been bought. The figures are a fair picture of the market and not a census of it.