HVAC permit requirements in Texas

Texas has no statewide residential building-permit mandate. Whether your AC changeout needs a permit depends entirely on which city — or which patch of unincorporated county land — your house sits on.

What IS statewide: the contractor license. Anyone contracting HVAC work in Texas must hold a TDLR Air Conditioning and Refrigeration (ACR) contractor license under Texas Occupations Code Chapter 1302, verified at tdlr.texas.gov. (The statute’s exact text isn’t fetchable from the capitol site; TDLR’s official summary is the authority we used.) That license requirement applies whether or not a permit does.

In practice, every major Texas city requires a mechanical permit for a system changeout under its adopted code. Houston is the only major city where we could verify the fee formula on an official source: 2% of job cost, plus $47.00, plus a $33.56 admin fee, per the Houston Permitting Center. Dallas ($125-$167) and San Antonio ($60) figures come from third-party fee summaries only — treat them as approximate. Across cities that require permits, expect roughly $60-$300+.

The flip side is the unincorporated-county reality: large swaths of rural Texas have no residential mechanical permitting at all. If you’re outside city limits, call the county before assuming either way.

Two practical rules. First, the licensed ACR contractor pulls the permit where one is required — a bidder who asks you to pull it yourself is a red flag. Second, a permit fee buried in a quote isn’t padding in Houston; it’s a published formula you can check line by line.