Best Metro Areas for Heating, Air Conditioning, and Refrigeration Mechanics and Installers in 2026

Across the country, HVAC mechanics and installers have a national median annual salary of $61,010 and national employment of 409,670, with employment for the occupation projected to grow 8.1% nationally. The top-ranked metros in LaborCove’s list all sit above the national median salary, but they differ substantially in employment counts and Geography Scores. That variation means each top metro reflects a different balance between pay levels, scale of the local job base as measured by employment, and its composite Geography Score ranking. Within the top 10, New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ stands out by combining the highest LaborCove Geography Score with the largest employment count reported in this group. At the same time, Fairbanks-College, AK illustrates that a metro can have a high median salary but a much smaller reported employment count while still landing in the top 10. These contrasts underscore how LaborCove’s rankings bring together several metrics rather than mirroring salary or employment alone.

For heating, air conditioning, and refrigeration mechanics and installers nationwide, the median annual salary is $61,010. National employment for this occupation stands at 409,670. At the national level, employment in this field is projected to grow by 8.1%, which provides a broad context for evaluating metro-level results. The top 10 metros in LaborCove’s ranking all report median salaries above the national median, with metro values ranging from $64,580 to $93,820. While the national figures give a single benchmark, the metro-level data show how specific locations can sit above that baseline in different ways when salary, employment, and Geography Score are all considered together.

LaborCove ranks New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ as the #1 metro for HVAC mechanics and installers, with a LaborCove Geography Score of 79.62. This is higher than the score for any of the other nine metros in the top 10. The next two metros, Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA and San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA, have Geography Scores of 58.85 and 54.73, respectively. Among the remaining metros listed, Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH (54.70), Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN (54.17), and San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA (53.77) cluster closely together on Geography Score. At the lower end of the top-10 range, Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD has a Geography Score of 49.98, and Fairbanks-College, AK has a Geography Score of 49.82, while still ranking ninth and tenth overall. These results illustrate that differences in Geography Score within the top 10 can be substantial, even though all these metros appear near the top of LaborCove’s national list for this occupation.

The top 10 metros for HVAC mechanics and installers all have median annual salaries above the national median of $61,010, but the specific levels vary. Fairbanks-College, AK reports the highest median salary in this group at $93,820. San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA and Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA also rank toward the higher end on pay, with median salaries of $82,050 and $80,100, respectively. New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ, the #1 ranked metro overall, has a median salary of $77,990, while Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA and Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN report median salaries of $73,830 and $77,960. Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD has the lowest median salary among the top 10 at $64,580, which is still above the national benchmark. These figures show that salary levels within the top tier of metros can differ by tens of thousands of dollars per year, even when all the metros share high LaborCove rankings for this occupation.

The metros in LaborCove’s top 10 also differ sharply in reported employment counts for HVAC mechanics and installers. New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ has the highest employment in this group at 21,820, which is the largest employment market reported in the supplied geographic data. Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA reports 10,720 employed HVAC mechanics and installers, and Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV reports 8,730. Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN and Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD have employment counts of 7,210 and 8,610, respectively, while Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH reports 6,050. At the smaller end of the spectrum among the top 10, San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA has an employment count of 1,740, Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA has 3,940, and Fairbanks-College, AK has 90. These numbers demonstrate that top-ranked metros can span a wide range of employment scales, from tens of thousands of reported jobs to fewer than one hundred in the case of Fairbanks-College, AK, even while all are included in the top 10.

LaborCove’s results show that the highest salary does not automatically coincide with the highest Geography Score. Fairbanks-College, AK reports the highest median salary in the top 10 at $93,820 but ranks tenth overall with a Geography Score of 49.82. In contrast, New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ ranks first with a Geography Score of 79.62 and a median salary of $77,990, which is lower than the salary reported for Fairbanks-College, AK. Similarly, Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD has the lowest median salary in the top 10 at $64,580 yet holds the #9 rank with a Geography Score of 49.98, slightly above Fairbanks-College, AK’s score. San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA illustrates another version of this pattern: it reports a relatively high median salary of $82,050 while ranking third with a Geography Score of 54.73. These comparisons indicate that LaborCove’s Geography Score incorporates more than pay alone, as metros with higher salaries do not always rank above metros with lower salaries in the overall top-10 list.

LaborCove builds its metro rankings for heating, air conditioning, and refrigeration mechanics and installers using authoritative labor-market data and its proprietary LaborCove Geography Score. For each metro area, we consider supplied measures such as median annual salary, employment, and the resulting Geography Score and rank. The Geography Score is a composite measure produced by LaborCove’s scoring methodology. While this article compares salaries, employment counts, ranks, and Geography Scores, it does not reverse-engineer how each underlying factor contributes to the final score. Instead, it highlights observable numeric differences from the supplied data. These rankings are designed as a structured comparison tool, not as a prediction of individual outcomes. HVAC professionals and students should weigh LaborCove results alongside personal factors such as preferred regions, credentials, and non-work considerations that are outside the scope of this dataset.