The New HVAC Millionaires, and Who Pays for Them

This series has made an argument across nine posts: that the private-equity roll-up of HVAC is built to reward investors, and that the long-run costs land on technicians, homeowners, and communities. This post is where that argument has to face its own weakest link, because if you actually weigh the evidence, the two sides of the ledger are not measured to the same precision. One side we can count to the dollar. The other we mostly can’t. And that imbalance cuts against the tidy version of the thesis.

So let’s do the accounting.

Start with the good news, because it’s real

The most visible human outcome of the roll-up wave is genuinely positive, and it has a name: the new skilled-trades millionaires. A Wall Street Journal feature put it plainly. The title: “The Millionaire Next Door Could Be Your Plumber”. The piece reported that private equity has purchased nearly 800 skilled-trade companies since 2022, and that “some plumbers and HVAC workers are becoming millionaires as a result of private equity buying their businesses.”¹² For the contractor who spent decades building a business, the arrival of a deep-pocketed buyer is often the best financial day of their life.

And it’s not only the owners. The same WSJ reporting notes that at one acquirer, “the technicians at the businesses they acquire get roughly a 20% pay bump through an increase in both wages and bonuses and commissions,” and that some workers feel they’re now at “more professionalized kinds of businesses” with “more advancement opportunities.”¹ The critical case has to put those facts on the table first.

The investor side of the ledger, which we can count

Here is what our ownership graph lets us do that no one else can: put named, dated numbers on the investor-side gains.³ These are not estimates or aggregates; they are individual, dated deals, each figure stated as reported by the cited source:

Apex Service Partners (the largest PE-backed residential HVAC/plumbing/electrical platform in the country, built since 2019 by California-based Alpine Investors) drew a $2 billion minority investment from Apollo at a ~$10 billion valuation, announced May 2026, on a business generating “over” $500 million of EBITDA.⁴⁵ As reported by the parties, Alpine had already moved the platform into a $3.4 billion single-asset continuation fund.⁵
Champions Group (built by CenterOak, flipped to Odyssey) is, as announced by the parties, being acquired by Blackstone for roughly $2.5 billion (announced February 2026).⁵
Sila Services, as reported, flipped from Morgan Stanley to Goldman Sachs Alternatives (2024), valued around $1.5 billion including debt.⁵

Those are the rewards the model is engineered to produce, and our data holds the receipts: platform creation, the add-ons that fattened the asset, and the flip or recap that crystallizes the gain. The investor side of the asymmetry is strong, specific, and large.

The other side of the ledger, which we mostly can’t

Now the side the thesis needs, and here the record forces a hard admission: the rigorous evidence that workers and customers are made worse off is thin, and some of it cuts the other way.

Consider what the best studies actually find. The landmark Davis–Haltiwanger study of private equity and employment found that jobs at target establishments decline about 3% over two years, but that net job change is less than 1% of initial employment once you count the new jobs PE-backed firms create, with the losses concentrated in public-to-private and retail deals, not the independently-owned firms that describe most HVAC targets.⁶ A more recent NBER study modeling PE’s effect on workers found no evidence that PE-backed firms cut wages by exploiting local labor market power, describing the pattern instead as “efficient reallocation” of workers toward more productive plants.⁷ These are not the findings of a model that reliably immiserates workers.

So where is the harm? It lives in the places our hard data can’t reach:

The customer price side is unmeasured. No study has shown whether PE-owned HVAC contractors charge more or replace more than independents for the same problem, and our own ratings data shows no quality penalty (4.66★ vs 4.62★).⁵⁸ The strongest evidence of customer harm is analogical (the higher charges and procedure-shifting found in PE-owned dentistry and nursing homes),⁸ explicitly not measured in HVAC.
The technician-incentive complaints are real but qualitative. Even the favorable WSJ piece notes workers who feel “pushed more to become salespeople than doing repairs, having to upsell customers.”¹ That is lived experience and texture, not a measured rate, and it sits alongside the 20% pay bump, not in place of it.

The asymmetry, restated

Put the two columns side by side and the real shape of the thesis appears, and it is not the crude “investors win, everyone else loses.” It is subtler and, we’d argue, more damning for being true:

The gains are concentrated, measurable, and certain. The costs are diffuse, contested, and largely unmeasured. We can tell you, to the reported dollar, that Apollo put $2 billion into Apex at a $10 billion valuation. We cannot tell you what the average homeowner pays for the privilege, or whether the repair-first technician is quietly being selected out of the trade, because no one has counted, and our data can’t. The investor’s reward is a number in a press release. The customer’s and the worker’s share of the bill, if there is one, is spread across thousands of invoices and career choices that no database captures.

That is the asymmetry worth naming: not just who gets the money, but who gets measured. A system in which the winnings are precisely quantified and the costs are nobody’s job to count is a system whose scorecard will always flatter the winners.

What it means

For the cashed-out founder and the technician with a 20% raise, the roll-up has already delivered, and that’s not nothing. For everyone downstream (the homeowner on the next service call, the repair-first tech weighing whether this is still their trade, the community watching the profit stream redirect¹²), the verdict is genuinely open, because the measurement that would close it hasn’t been done.

The policy reading is the same as it was for antitrust¹³: the model isn’t hiding anything, and much of what it does is legal and even beneficial to some. The unease is about trajectory and distribution, a wave of consolidation whose gains are bankable today and whose costs, if they come, arrive slowly and land on people who never signed the deal. Our data can prove the gains are real and large. It cannot prove the costs are. What the proprietary dataset can say is that it has counted one side of the ledger precisely, and that the other side is still blank.

The bottom line. Private equity really has minted HVAC millionaires and handed some technicians 20% raises. Concede it fully. And our data really can put hard, named numbers on the investor windfall, each as reported by the parties or the cited source: $10 billion at Apex, $2.5 billion at Champions, $1.5 billion at Sila. What no one can put a number on (including us) is the homeowner’s price, the repair-first technician’s future, or the community’s lost profit stream. So the thesis, stated at its most defensible, is not “investors win and you lose.” It’s that the winnings are counted and the costs are not, and a ledger kept that way will always look like a success. Who pays for the new HVAC millionaires may be the right question. The answer, for now, is that no one has been made to add it up.

Sources

Te-Ping Chen / J.R. Whalen, “The Millionaire Next Door Could Be Your Plumber,” The Wall Street Journal, Your Money Briefing podcast (transcript), Oct 14 2024. Tier 1 (reporting). https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/your-money-matters/the-millionaire-next-door-could-be-your-plumber/771b270b-db83-48cb-bfbb-4f6341566d6b ↩ ↩² ↩³
“Axial’s Take: Plumbing & HVAC Millionaires (from WSJ),” Axial, The Middle Market Review. Tier 2 (industry commentary on the WSJ piece). https://www.axial.net/forum/axials-take-plumbing-hvac-millionaires-from-wsj ↩
Our figures come from the hvacrollups ownership graph: a curated, evidence-gated record, not a census, so the counts are a floor on the scale of consolidation. See our methodology and legal disclaimers. ↩
“Apex Service Partners to receive minority investment at $10 billion valuation,” Homepros, May 27 2026 (Apollo $2B minority; >$500M EBITDA; Alpine-backed). Tier 1 (reporting). https://homepros.news/apex-service-partners-to-receive-minority-investment-at-10-billion-valuation ↩
Proprietary Data Findings: PE Roll-Ups of HVAC Service Companies (hvacrollups ownership graph), 2026-06-09, §§3, 5, 7. Internal research memo. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
Steven J. Davis, John Haltiwanger, Ron Jarmin, Josh Lerner & Javier Miranda, “Private Equity and Employment,” NBER, summarized in The NBER Digest, Jan 2012 (net job change <1%; 13.5pp gross job reallocation; losses concentrated in public-to-private and retail). Tier 1, analogical (cross-industry). https://www.nber.org/digest/jan12/private-equity-and-employment ↩
“Private Equity and Workers: Modeling and Measuring Monopsony, Implicit Contracts, and Efficient Reallocation,” NBER Working Paper 33942 (no evidence of monopsony-driven wage/employment cuts; “efficient reallocation”). Tier 1, analogical (cross-industry). https://www.nber.org/papers/w33942 ↩
A related essay in this series, “What a Nursing Home Can Teach You About Your Air Conditioner”, on the HVAC ratings non-finding and the analogical evidence from PE-owned dentistry and nursing homes. ↩ ↩²
Acquired HVAC business owner, public YouTube interview, 2024–2026. (Individual on-the-record account.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpQWAxLe0Dk ↩
HVAC business owner on selling to a roll-up platform, public YouTube interview. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHr7_BXDXK0 ↩
Public YouTube commentary on the private-equity hold-and-flip lifecycle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNhl7z_WrKw ↩
A related essay in this series, “The Money Leaves Town”, on the community watching the local profit stream redirect to distant owners. ↩
A related essay in this series, “Flying Under the Antitrust Radar”, on the antitrust and policy reading of HVAC consolidation. ↩