Market Research: What Resources Are Actually Available to Home Services Business Owners?

Every few weeks a contractor asks me some version of the same question: “Where do I actually find good industry data? Benchmarks? People who know what they’re doing?” It’s a fair question, because the home services information landscape is a mess. There’s genuinely useful data out there, and there’s a mountain of vendor marketing dressed up as research. After working inside home services companies every day — and reviewing hundreds of contractor P&Ls on the buy-side of acquisitions — here’s my honest map of what’s available, what it costs, and where each resource falls short.

Trade Associations: The Boring, Reliable Layer

ACCA (Air Conditioning Contractors of America)

If you’re HVAC-focused, ACCA is the association that publishes the most useful financial data. Their Annual Financial Survey feeds a Contractor Financial & Operating Performance Report — real margin, overhead, and compensation data from member contractors. The report is priced at $249, and contractors who participate in the survey get it free. ACCA also runs MIX Groups, which put non-competing contractors in the same room to compare numbers honestly. Membership is tiered (Bronze/Silver/Gold), so cost depends on what you buy. The limitation: it’s survey data, self-reported by members, and skews toward shops engaged enough to fill out surveys.

PHCC (Plumbing-Heating-Cooling Contractors)

PHCC represents roughly 3,300 plumbing and HVACR businesses. Their most practical asset is the labor unit database (built on the CINX platform, with 13,000+ national average installation times) — genuinely useful for estimating. They’ve also launched Visionary Peer Groups that include benchmarking. Dues run through your state or local chapter and vary, so budget anywhere from a few hundred to over a thousand a year. Worth it mostly for the estimating tools, contracts, and local network, not for deep financial benchmarks.

NECA and NRCA

For electrical contractors, NECA publishes the standards and labor-unit material the industry runs on. For roofers, NRCA publishes technical manuals and Professional Roofing magazine. Both are stronger on technical and compliance content than on business benchmarking — useful, but don’t expect a P&L comparison out of either.

A quick note on NATE

NATE is a certification body, not a data source. It currently counts roughly 41,000–42,000 certified technicians nationwide — a useful credential when you’re hiring, but if someone cites “NATE data” as an industry benchmark, be skeptical. That’s not what they do.

Benchmark and Data Sources: Read the Fine Print

ServiceTitan reports and benchmarks

ServiceTitan publishes a steady stream of free research — State of the Trades, the annual Residential Trades Report (a survey of 1,000+ contractors), and seasonal benchmark reports. If you’re a customer, the in-platform benchmarking lets you compare call booking rates, completed revenue, and average ticket against similar shops. The catch: it’s a software vendor’s dataset, drawn from their customer base, published partly to sell software. Useful directional data — just remember who’s holding the pen. (On cost: ServiceTitan doesn’t publish pricing; third-party estimates put it roughly at $250–$500 per technician per month plus implementation fees, so the benchmarking only makes sense as a feature of software you’d buy anyway.)

Jobber Home Service Economic Report

Jobber’s quarterly report is free and draws on platform data from 350,000+ service professionals. Jobber’s reports say the category is stabilizing heading through 2026 — and their “new work scheduled” metric is a decent demand barometer. The limitation: Jobber’s base skews toward smaller operators, so the medians don’t map cleanly onto a $10M shop.

IBISWorld

IBISWorld publishes US industry reports on plumbing, HVAC, and related trades with market sizing, cost structure, and financial benchmarks. Per-report pricing isn’t published openly — expect four figures for a single report or a subscription. Good for market context (say, if you’re writing a bank package or evaluating an acquisition market); too high-altitude to run your business with.

BLS and Census Bureau

Free and underused. BLS occupational wage data tells you what plumbers, electricians, and HVAC techs actually earn by metro area — the best reality check on your pay scale that exists. Census Bureau construction and services data gives you market size and establishment counts. Neither tells you anything about your margins, but for labor-market and market-sizing questions, free government data beats most paid reports.

Best-Practice Groups: The Expensive, High-Signal Layer

For owners in the $5M–$30M range, the best-practice groups are usually where the highest-quality peer data lives — because members share real numbers with each other, not survey averages.

• Nexstar Network — the heavyweight. Members get assigned coaches across finance, marketing, call center, and sales, plus peer meetings and an annual conference. Reported membership cost runs upwards of $8,000 a year (one member forum cited roughly $21K in year one, ~$7K after). Not cheap, but the peer benchmarking among serious shops is the real product.
• Service Nation / Service Roundtable — tiered, starting around $99/month for the Roundtable level, with the Alliance tier adding a boot camp, coaching, and a performance dashboard benchmarked against other members. Lower cost of entry than Nexstar; quality depends heavily on your peer group.
• BDR (Business Development Resources) — coaching and training built exclusively for HVAC, plumbing, and electrical contractors since 1998; they run roughly 250 training classes a year and their Profit Coach program is finance-forward, which I respect.
• EGIA Contractor University — training, templates, and the annual EPIC conference (held each February in Las Vegas; the 2026 edition was February 12–13 at the Bellagio).

My honest take: a good group pays for itself, but only if you show up with your real numbers. Owners who join and hide their financials get the networking and none of the value.

Conferences Worth the Plane Ticket

• AHR Expo — the giant HVACR trade show, held each winter (the 2026 show was February 2–4 at the Las Vegas Convention Center). Registration is inexpensive; your real cost is travel. Best for equipment and technology, not business strategy.
• ACCA Conference & Expo — each spring; the 2026 edition ran March 15–18 in Las Vegas. The most business-focused of the HVAC events — sessions on leadership, finance, and workforce, run by an association rather than a vendor.
• ServiceTitan Pantheon — October 5–7, 2026 in Orlando. A user conference, so expect product evangelism, but the operator-led sessions are often strong.
• Service World Expo — multi-trade and business-heavy; the 2026 show is November 9–11 in Las Vegas. Good fit if you run more than one trade line.

Budget $1,500–$3,000 all-in per event and pick one or two a year. You’ll learn as much in hallway conversations as in sessions.

Free Communities: Noisy but Real

HVAC-Talk is the largest HVACR forum (the site reports 270,000+ members and over five million posts), and ContractorTalk covers all trades with 145,000+ members. The trade subreddits skew toward technicians rather than owners. All of it is free, all of it is uneven — great for sense-checking a pricing question or an equipment issue, terrible as a basis for strategic decisions. Treat forum consensus as one anecdote, not data.

The Data Gap Nobody Talks About

Here’s the structural problem with almost everything above: it’s self-reported. Association surveys depend on members filling out forms honestly. Software-vendor benchmarks reflect that vendor’s customer base and that vendor’s incentives. Nobody audits any of it.

Our benchmarks at Profitability Partners come from a different place: we’ve reviewed 200+ home services companies on the buy-side of acquisitions. That means actual P&Ls, job-level margins, and balance sheets — the numbers owners show when real money is on the table, not the numbers they put on a survey. It’s why our margin benchmarks sometimes look less flattering than the published surveys. Real books usually do.

How to Use Benchmarks Without Hurting Yourself

Three rules I give every client:

• Treat benchmarks as ranges, not gospel. A “55% gross margin benchmark” from a survey blends shops with different revenue mixes, markets, and accounting methods. If your number differs, find out why before you “fix” it.
• Your own job-level data beats any industry average. Knowing your margin by job type, by tech, by lead source will change decisions faster than knowing the national median. That’s what a real KPI dashboard is for.
• Match the definition before you compare. Half the “we’re below benchmark” panics I see are accounting differences — labor burden in COGS for one dataset and in overhead for another.

And if you want someone in your corner who reads these numbers for a living, that’s exactly the kind of work a trade-focused fractional CFO does.

FAQ

What’s the single best free resource for home services benchmarks?

Jobber’s quarterly Home Service Economic Report for demand trends, and BLS wage data for pay scales. Both are free; both are directional rather than prescriptive. For margin benchmarks, free sources are thin — that’s where association surveys and peer groups earn their fees.

Are best-practice groups like Nexstar worth the cost?

For owners in the $5M+ range who will share real financials and implement what they learn — usually yes. The peer benchmarking alone is better data than any published survey. If you join to network and keep your numbers private, save your money.

Why do industry benchmark reports disagree with each other?

Different samples, different definitions, all self-reported. One dataset’s “gross margin” includes labor burden; another’s doesn’t. Use any benchmark as a range, reconcile the definitions to your own chart of accounts, and trust your job-level data over the average.

About the Author

Raymond Gong

Raymond Gong is one of the senior partners of Profitability Partners, a fractional CFO and accounting firm built exclusively for home services companies — HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and roofing operators doing $5M–$30M in revenue. Prior to Profitability Partners, Raymond was a private equity professional at Black Diamond Capital Management and Third Lake Partners, a large family investment office. Raymond runs the books, the reporting, the profitability optimization, and the exit prep for contractors nationwide, working daily inside ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, and QuickBooks — turning messy operational data into financials owners can actually run the business on, and that buyers and lenders take seriously. Raymond is a graduate of Vanderbilt University and is based in Tampa, FL.

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Raymond Gong

Raymond Gong is one of the senior partners of Profitability Partners, a fractional CFO and accounting firm built exclusively for home services companies — HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and roofing operators doing $5M–$30M in revenue. Prior to Profitability Partners, Raymond was a private equity professional at Black Diamond Capital Management and Third Lake Partners, a large family investment office. Raymond runs the books, the reporting, the profitability optimization, and the exit prep for contractors nationwide, working daily inside ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, and QuickBooks — turning messy operational data into financials owners can actually run the business on, and that buyers and lenders take seriously. Raymond is a graduate of Vanderbilt University and is based in Tampa, FL.