HVAC Repair Cost in Delhi (2026)

Local rules & taxes in India

Sales tax on appliance repair

Repair labor is taxable here. An Indian air-conditioning repair carried out by a GST-registered business attracts 18% GST on the whole invoice - the technician's labour and visit charge, and every part fitted, whether that is an indoor control board, an outdoor inverter board, a fan motor, a capacitor, a compressor or refrigerant. Repair and maintenance work sits in the services classification under heading 9987, and consumer appliance and equipment repair is charged at the standard 18% rate. Published service accounting code tables show heading 9987 as '5/18%', which is a real feature of the schedule rather than an error, but the 5% branch is for narrow job-work entries - processing carried out on goods belonging to another registered person - and not for a call-out to a household. The 18% figure here is taken from published Indian rate tables rather than from the underlying rate notification text, and it is the one figure a reader might want to confirm on an invoice. The most useful recent change is on the equipment side, and it changes repair-versus-replace arithmetic rather than the repair bill. Air conditioners were taxed at 28%, the old luxury slab, for years. Under the reform package agreed at the 56th GST Council meeting, air-conditioning machines moved from 28% to 18% with effect from 22 September 2025. A new machine therefore became meaningfully cheaper - reported in the Indian market as a reduction of roughly fifteen hundred to twenty-five hundred rupees on a typical unit - while the tax on repairing the old one stayed where it was at 18%. Anyone comparing a quotation from before that date with one from after it is comparing two different tax regimes on the equipment. Registration decides whether a household sees GST at all, and in India that line is high enough to matter. GST registration becomes compulsory for a service provider once aggregate turnover passes twenty lakh rupees a year in most states, and ten lakh rupees in the special category states. A very large share of Indian residential AC servicing is done by local technicians and small firms below that line, who charge no GST. The result is a two-tier price: a brand service centre or an organised aggregator will show 18% on the bill, while the neighbourhood technician usually will not. That is a legitimate difference in tax status, not evidence of a cheaper trade, and it is one of the largest single reasons the same job carries very different quoted prices in the same city. Indian consumer prices are normally advertised inclusive of GST, so a rupee figure quoted to a homeowner is usually the amount payable. No published GST concession, exemption or rebate is specific to heating, cooling, ventilation, refrigeration or heat-pump work. India supports efficient appliances through the Bureau of Energy Efficiency star-rating programme and through equipment-side schemes, not through a reduced GST rate on a service call.

Rate on repair services: published Indian service accounting code tables give heading 9987, "Maintenance,Repair And Installation(Except Construction)Services", at "5/18%", with sub-code 998715 "Maintenance And Repair Services Of Electrical Household Appliances" likewise at "5/18%"; consumer repair and maintenance is charged at the 18% branch. Source: https://cleartax.in/s/maintenance-services-gst-rates-sac-code-9987, retrieved 2026-08-07. Equipment rate change: the 56th GST Council reduced air-conditioning machines from 28% to 18% with effect from 22 September 2025, reported in Indian coverage as "GST on air-conditioning machines has been reduced from 28% to 18%". Registration threshold: "For the supply of services, the threshold is Rs. 20 lakh for normal category states and Rs. 10 lakh for special category states." Disclosure on source quality: the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs GST portal is given as the source URL for this row because it is the regulator that publishes the Acts, rules and rate notifications, but its rate pages redirect to a separate tax-information portal. The three quotations above are therefore taken from published Indian tax references rather than from the notification text, which is one notch weaker than a direct statutory read and is flagged rather than hidden.

Official source: cbic-gst.gov.in

Licensing & certification

India has no national HVAC technician licence. Two separate legal regimes touch a residential air-conditioning job, and neither of them is a trade licence: one governs refrigerant, the other governs electrical installation work and is administered state by state. Refrigerant first. The Ozone Depleting Substances (Regulation and Control) Rules, 2000, made under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 and overseen by the Ozone Cell of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, require registration for anyone whose activity uses a controlled substance. Rule 8(1) is explicit, verbatim: "No person or enterprise shall engage in any activity specified in column (2) of Schedule IV that uses ozone depleting substances specified in column (3) of that Schedule after the date specified in column (5) of Schedule V unless he is registered with the authority specified in column (4) of that Schedule." Servicing of refrigeration and air-conditioning equipment is one of the listed activities, and rule 11(1) applies the same registration requirement to reclaiming a controlled substance. The Rules also define what a technician is supposed to do with the gas, verbatim: "recovery means collection and storage of ozone depleting substances from machinery, equipment, or containment vessel during servicing or prior to disposal". The scope of that regime is narrower than it first appears, and saying so honestly is important. The Rules control ozone-depleting substances - the R-22 still found in older Indian split and window units. The refrigerants in almost every air conditioner sold in India today, R-32 and R-410A, are hydrofluorocarbons: they are potent greenhouse gases but they do not deplete ozone, so the ODS Rules do not reach them. India has ratified the Kigali Amendment and its hydrofluorocarbon phase-down is scheduled to begin in the 2030s. The practical position in 2026 is that a technician regassing an R-32 machine is not operating under a personal refrigerant licence in the way a European or Australian technician would be. Electrical work second. Fixed electrical installation work is reserved to licensed contractors under regulations made by the Central Electricity Authority and licensed by each state government through its own electrical licensing board, so the licence a customer is shown is a state licence, not a national one. The long-standing wording of the requirement, verbatim from regulation 29(1) of the Central Electricity Authority (Measures relating to Safety and Electric Supply) Regulations, 2010: "No electrical installation work, including additions, alterations, repairs and adjustments to existing installations, except such replacement of lamps, fans, fuses, switches, domestic appliances of voltage not exceeding 250V and fittings as in no way alters its capacity or character, shall be carried out upon the premises of or on behalf of any consumer, supplier, owner or occupier for the purpose of supply to such consumer, supplier, owner or occupier except by an electrical contractor licensed in this behalf by the State Government and under the direct supervision of a person holding a certificate of competency and by a person holding a permit issued or recognised by the State Government." The carve-out in the middle of that sentence is what most household AC work actually relies on: replacing a domestic appliance at not more than 250V, without altering the installation's capacity or character, is outside the licensing requirement. Servicing or repairing an existing air conditioner therefore does not require a licensed electrical contractor. Running a new dedicated circuit from the distribution board for an outdoor unit does, because that alters the installation. Two limits are worth stating. The 2010 regulations have been superseded by the Central Electricity Authority (Measures relating to Safety and Electric Supply) Regulations, 2023, notified in June 2023 and amended in April 2026; Indian summaries of the 2023 instrument reproduce the contractor-licensing requirement in substantially the same words, but the wording quoted above is from the 2010 instrument rather than the 2023 text, and its regulation number in the current rules is not confirmed here. Separately, skills certification for Indian air-conditioning technicians exists through the national skills framework and manufacturer training programmes, but it is voluntary rather than a condition of practising, and no Indian body that licenses domestic HVAC technicians as such has been identified.

This is general information, not legal or tax advice. Rates and rules change — confirm with the official sources above.