How often should I get my HVAC serviced?

The honest version: annual service is one of the few maintenance items where the pro visit genuinely earns its money, and it is also one of the easiest to let slide for three years running. What “annual” means depends on what equipment you have.

Furnace plus AC: two visits, two seasons

These are separate machines sharing ductwork, and they wear differently. The heating check belongs in early fall, before the first cold snap; the cooling check belongs in spring, before the first heat wave. Booking either one in-season means competing with everyone whose system just failed — off-season scheduling is cheaper and faster.

Heat pump: also twice, for a different reason

A heat pump is one machine doing both jobs, which means it accumulates roughly double the annual runtime of either a furnace or an AC alone. Two visits a year is standard, not excessive.

What the visit is actually buying

• On a gas furnace: an inspection of the heat exchanger for cracks. This is the safety item — a cracked exchanger can leak carbon monoxide into the house, and it is not visible without the right tools.
• Burner cleaning and combustion check, which is where efficiency quietly leaks away.
• Refrigerant pressure and coil condition on the cooling side, which catches slow leaks while they are still cheap.
• Safety control and limit-switch testing — the parts whose whole job is failing safely.

What you can do between visits

Change the filter on schedule, keep two feet of clearance around the outdoor condenser, and rinse the condenser fins with a garden hose once a season. That handles most of what makes systems fail early, and it costs nothing.

A tune-up typically runs somewhere in the $80–200 range depending on the market and the equipment. Set against a compressor replacement or a cracked heat exchanger found the hard way, it is not a close call.