How often is a home HVAC system replaced?

Manufacturers say a furnace lasts 15 to 20 years and an air conditioner 10 to 15. Those are engineering estimates. What follows is what homeowners actually did: 19,493,824 residential HVAC permits across 16,502,679 American homes, of which 1,255,564 were filed in the last twelve months. All figures derived August 30, 2026.

How long between replacements

For homes that appear twice or more in the permit record for the same kind of equipment, the gap between consecutive jobs is the closest thing this data has to a service life. Heating and cooling are separated deliberately — see the note below the table for why pooling them produces a wrong answer.

The bottom row is the trap. Pool all HVAC equipment together and the median gap drops to 11 years — but that is measuring a furnace replaced in 2014 against an air conditioner replaced in 2020 and calling it an eleven-year system life. They are two different machines that happen to share a permit classification. Split apart, furnaces run 13 years and cooling 12.

Both medians are floors, and knowingly so. A jurisdiction that started publishing permits in 2005 cannot show you a 25-year interval; only the short ones fit inside the window. The true central estimate sits above 13 years, and the manufacturer range of 15–20 is compatible with what we see. The 75th percentile — 19 years for a furnace — is the more honest read of the long tail.

The house is usually much older than the system

Home age at the moment of an HVAC replacement, for permits since 2020 on homes at least five years old. The median is 39 years; the mean is 43.7.

The distribution has no peak worth naming — it climbs gently and then sits down across everything older than thirty. That is what you would expect if replacement is driven by equipment age rather than house age, because an old house has already cycled through several systems and is no more likely to be due this year than any other old house. The useful reading is the opposite of a targeting rule: house age alone will not tell you whose furnace is about to fail. The 15–24 band, 612,634 permits, is the one place where house age and equipment age still coincide — a home’s original system reaching the end of its first life.

The heat pump line

Of residential HVAC permits that explicitly describe a replacement, the share naming a heat pump, mini-split or ductless system:

A steady climb rather than an inflection: 8.8% to 14.4% over nine years, with the fastest movement after 2022. There is no visible cliff at the Inflation Reduction Act’s 2023 heat-pump credits — the line was already rising and continued at about the same slope. Whatever is driving this is slower and broader than any single incentive.

By state, where the spread is 35x

Maryland 35.6%, Michigan 1.0%. The ordering is not about climate — if it were, Florida would be near the top and it sits mid-table at 13.7%. It is about what the house already burns. The Southeast and mid-Atlantic heat with electricity because gas distribution never reached much of it, so a heat pump is the like-for-like replacement; the Midwest heats with gas, where a heat pump means abandoning a working gas line and the furnace wins by default. Washington and Oregon are the exception that confirms it — cheap hydroelectricity and mild winters made electric heating normal there decades before anyone called it electrification.

Ohio at 5.1% is the number we would have got wrong. Read straight from the permit text it looks like 34.4%, which would have made Ohio the second-most electrified state in the country and ten times its immediate neighbours. Franklin County files HVAC permits under a form heading that reads “replacement of a single furnace air conditioning and/or heat pump” — the phrase is the name of the permit category, not a description of the work, and it appears on 21,654 permits. Excluding that template puts Ohio between Indiana and Illinois, where the surrounding data says it belongs.

When the calls come in

Residential HVAC permits by month, 2021 through 2025, split by what the permit describes.

The two curves behave completely differently. Cooling swings 65% from a February floor to a July peak. Heating swings 22%, and its peak is a broad October-to-January plateau rather than a spike.

That asymmetry is a fact about how the two purchases get made. Air conditioning is replaced when it dies in a heatwave, which is a distressed purchase at the worst possible moment for price. Heating gets replaced on a schedule — its October peak lands before the cold, not during it, which means a meaningful share of furnace replacements are planned rather than emergency. For a contractor, the arbitrage is obvious and mostly unworked: the homes that will make a panicked July call are identifiable in February.

Methodology

• Source. Scout Data’s production permit database: building permits ingested from permitting jurisdictions across the United States and refreshed continuously. 19,493,824 HVAC-classified permits on residential property, across 16,502,679 homes.
• Replacement cohort. Where this page says “replacement” it means the permit description itself says so — replace, replacement, change-out or swap. New construction is excluded by that requirement, since a new home’s first furnace is not a replacement.
• Intervals. The year gap between consecutive permits for the same equipment class on the same home, keeping gaps of three years or more so that corrections and re-filings of one job are not counted as two. Censored by coverage: an interval longer than a jurisdiction’s permit history cannot appear, so every median here is a floor on true equipment life.
• Home age. Permit year minus recorded build year, for permits since 2020 on homes at least five years old with a plausible build year. This is the age of the house, never of the equipment — the data does not carry an install date for the unit being removed.
• The date sentinel. 83,307 residential HVAC permits carry a 1900-01-01 placeholder where the issue date should be. Read literally they would put furnace replacements in the McKinley administration. They are excluded from every time-based figure.
• One boilerplate template is excluded. Franklin County, Ohio names its HVAC permit category “replacement of a single furnace air conditioning and/or heat pump”, which puts the words “heat pump” on every furnace replacement in Columbus. Permits matching that template are excluded from heat-pump figures. Without the exclusion Ohio reads 34.4% instead of 5.1%.
• Equipment identification is by description text, so it depends on the permit saying what was installed. Permits too terse to name equipment are excluded from the heat-pump and seasonality splits rather than being assigned a default, which is why those tables have smaller denominators than the permit totals.
• Coverage. Not every U.S. jurisdiction publishes permits and we do not ingest every one that does. All counts are floors on true activity, and the state table is a share within each state rather than a comparison of volumes between them.

Derived August 30, 2026. Spot something that looks wrong? Tell us — we’d rather correct a number than defend it.

Companion pages: roof replacement statistics applies the same permit-gap method to roofs, how old American homes are covers the build-year data underneath the age figures, how to get HVAC leads and HVAC lead generation cover turning these signals into work.

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