Every company listed met all of these when we checked in October 2026:

  • a Google rating of 4.5 stars or higher and at least 20 Google reviews on at least one of its Google listings;
  • an active license with the Arizona Registrar of Contractors (ROC) in one of these classes: R-39, R-39R, C-39, CR-39, C-79, CR-79, C-58 or CR-58, on the ROC's list of current active contractors dated October 2, 2026;
  • a Google listing with a ZIP code in the Phoenix metro: Maricopa and Pinal counties. We count a ZIP code as in the metro when most of its land area is in those two counties, using the Census Bureau's 2020 ZIP-code-to-county file.

We matched each company to its license in one of two ways: the ROC license number the company publishes on its own website, or an exact match between the company's Google name and the business name or "doing business as" name on the ROC list, ignoring capitalization, punctuation, "&" versus "and", and words such as LLC, Inc., Co., Corp., The and Arizona. Companies we could not match this way are not listed yet. A company may be missing because it did not meet these checks when we looked, did not appear in our Google search, or has not been matched to its license yet. Being unlisted is not a finding about its work.

The rating and review bar

A company meets the Phoenix rating and review bar when one of its Google listings has a rating of 4.8 stars or higher and at least 475 reviews. We set the review number by one rule for every market: the 75th percentile (nearest-rank method) of review counts among the companies listed here (each company counted once, by its most-reviewed listing), rounded down to the nearest 25. For the Phoenix metro in October 2026, that was 476 reviews across 384 companies, so the bar is 475. The bar is set once per award year. Meeting it now is not the same as Top-Rated recognition, which opens in 2027 and also requires service in the metro.

How results are ordered

Companies that meet the rating and review bar and are within about 15 miles of your ZIP code come first. Everyone else follows. Within each group, results are ordered by the distance between the center of your ZIP code and the center of the company's nearest listed ZIP code. A listed location is not the company's service area. There is no paid placement, and companies cannot pay to be listed or to move up.

"Work for" uses the license class: classes starting with R or CR cover residential work, and classes starting with C or CR cover commercial work.

Ratings, reviews and licenses change. Check a license yourself with the ROC (opens in a new tab), and see how to hire an HVAC company.

The HVAC Standard is published by Joel Keith, who also runs a marketing agency; one or more companies listed here work with it. They are held to the same checks as every other company. See the disclosure.