Where This Trade Is Headed, From Someone Who Has Watched It Change Three Times

I still have the invoice. June 1993, Woodward, Oklahoma. Three pounds of R-502 at ten dollars and fifty cents a pound, into the milk section of a dairy delivery truck. Two and a half hours of labor at thirty dollars an hour.

R-502 is gone now. It was phased out for punching a hole in the ozone layer, and if you are under forty you have probably never held a jug of it. I have watched this trade change refrigerants three times since I wrote that invoice, and on January 1st of this year it changed again.

So when somebody asks me where this trade is headed, I am not guessing. I have been through this before.

What actually changed on January 1, 2026

The EPA’s AIM Act Technology Transitions Rule took effect. New residential and light commercial systems can no longer be installed using high global warming potential refrigerants like R-410A. Manufacturers already stopped building residential R-410A equipment at the start of 2025. What replaces it in most ducted equipment is R-454B, a blend of R-32 and R-1234yf.

The number that matters: R-454B has a global warming potential of about 466, roughly 78 percent lower than R-410A. That is the entire point of the change.

R-454B is classified A2L, which means mildly flammable. I want to be careful with that word, because it scares people and it should not. A2L means a very low burning velocity. It is not propane. It is not going to make your house a bomb. It does mean the equipment is engineered differently, with leak detection and different service procedures, and it means the cylinders are physically different and cannot sit on the same shelf as R-410A.

You do not need to replace a working air conditioner because of this. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something. What is true is that as the years pass, R-410A gets more expensive and harder to source, the same way R-22 did after 2020. If your system is old and already leaking, that math starts to matter. If it is running fine, run it.

That is the honest version. I watched two of these transitions get used as a scare tactic by contractors who wanted a change-out, and I am not doing it a third time.

The part nobody outside the trade sees

This change is not really about a gas. It is about paperwork and training.

A2L work means documented refrigerant recovery, serial numbers tagged per system, certifications tracked per technician, and cleaner audit trails than this trade has ever been asked to keep. Distributors want digital records. Inventory has to be physically separated. Quotes have to be repriced more often, because the equipment and the refrigerant are both moving.

Shops that were run out of a notebook are going to struggle with that. Shops that already document everything will barely notice. That gap is going to sort this industry over the next five years more than the refrigerant itself will.

Where the people went

Here is the number that should get everyone’s attention, homeowner or apprentice.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects about 40,100 openings a year for heating, air conditioning and refrigeration mechanics and installers through 2034, with employment growing 8 percent from 2024 to 2034, which is faster than average. There were roughly 425,200 people doing this job in 2024. You can read that yourself in the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook.

Most of those openings are not new jobs. They are replacements. Industry surveys put the median technician in his forties, with a large share of the workforce reaching retirement age within the next decade. Trade schools are not producing enough people to cover that.

This is not a demand problem or an economy problem. It is arithmetic, and it is going to keep being arithmetic for at least a decade.

What that means if you are a homeowner

It means the good techs get busier and harder to book, and it means experience gets more expensive, not less. It also means you should be more careful who you let touch your equipment, because a tight labor market is exactly when undertrained people end up on trucks.

Ask who is actually coming to your house. Ask what they are certified on. On geothermal, ask whether they are IGSHPA accredited, because loop work is not something you pick up on the job in a summer.

What that means if you are eighteen and deciding

I started in this trade at sixteen and a half, working for my dad doing electrical and HVAC/R. I got my own license in Woodward in 1980, when I was eighteen. The year after that Oklahoma began licensing the trade and grandfathered in those of us who already had one.

I am not going to pretend it is easy. You will be in attics in July and crawlspaces in January. But the arithmetic above is the best case anybody entering a trade has had in my lifetime: an aging workforce, a documented shortage, work that cannot be sent overseas, and equipment getting more technical rather than less, which protects the people who actually learn it.

The other thing worth saying plainly: this is not a dead-end job. It is a licensed profession with a ladder. Apprentice, journeyman, contractor. I have climbed it twice. The second time I sat the Oklahoma exam again in 2014, after my license lapsed while I was working in Texas. Nobody grandfathered me that time. I passed it at fifty-two.

Where I think it actually goes from here

Four things, and I will be honest about which are certain and which are my opinion.

Call	What I think
Certain	The refrigerant floor keeps rising. R-502 to R-22 to R-410A to R-454B is not a finished sequence. Every transition I have seen has been followed by another one. Buy equipment on how well it fits your house and how well it is installed, not on a refrigerant you hope is permanent, because none of them are.
Certain	Documentation becomes part of the job. Refrigerant tracking, certifications, serial numbers. The technician who can do the paperwork is going to be worth more than the one who cannot, which is not how this trade used to work.
My opinion	The ground stays at 55 degrees. Air-source equipment gets better every cycle and genuinely has gotten remarkable. But it still has to reject heat into 108 degree Oklahoma air in July and pull it out of 15 degree air in January. A geothermal loop does not care what the weather is doing. That physics has not changed in the 47 years I have been doing this and it is not going to.
My opinion	Diagnosis gets harder, not easier. Variable speed, communicating controls, inverter compressors, leak detection on A2L systems. The equipment self-reports more and is less forgiving of a guess. That is good for people who measure and bad for people who swap parts until it works.

What I would do about it

If your system is R-410A and working, keep it and maintain it. If it is failing and old, price a replacement on install quality and equipment fit, and ask the contractor to explain the A2L handling on your specific system. If they cannot, that tells you something.

If you are thinking about geothermal, the loop is the part that outlives everything else. A properly engineered loop will be there long after the equipment inside has been replaced, possibly twice. That is why the loop is the part I will not let anybody rush.

And if you are young and reading this because somebody sent it to you: the trade needs you, and the numbers say it is going to need you for a long time.

Questions I get about this

Related reading: geothermal in Oklahoma · HVAC apprentice openings · a 5-ton geothermal job in Geary

Written by Dave Hartzell, owner of Hartzell’s Heat & Air in Kingfisher, Oklahoma. Oklahoma Mechanical Contractor license #00115936. NATE certified, IGSHPA accredited for geothermal.