HVAC

What the work is

HVAC is a building's heating, ventilation and air conditioning: the machines that heat, cool and renew the air, the ducts and pipework that connect them, and the work of installing them, commissioning them and keeping them running. It is field work, done in the client's building by technicians who come back year after year, from the split unit in a shop to the chillers and air handling units of a hospital or a shopping centre.

The market in Portugal

In Portugal there are 2,346 firms registered in the installation of air conditioning and ventilation systems and 12,991 people working in them (INE, Sistema de Contas Integradas das Empresas, 2024). The sector turned over €1,181 million that year. It is a market made of small firms: 88% of them have fewer than ten people on the payroll, and together those firms account for a third of the sector's turnover. At the other end, only 25 firms in the whole country have fifty people or more, and only three reach two hundred and fifty. No single firm dominates the market. There are hundreds of local firms, each with its own name, its own area and its own long-standing clients.

2,346 firms in the installation of air conditioning and ventilation systems, CAE Rev.3 43222, a subclass INE publishes separately from plumbing. Source: INE, Sistema de Contas Integradas das Empresas, 2024.

12,991 people employed in that same activity. Source: INE, Sistema de Contas Integradas das Empresas, 2024.

88.3% of firms have fewer than ten people on the payroll and account for 33.2% of the sector's turnover; the 25 firms with fifty people or more account for 29.5%. Calculated from INE, Sistema de Contas Integradas das Empresas, 2024.

Public statistics. Each figure carries its source and year.

Why it recurs

Air conditioning is not installed and then forgotten. An installed system has to be maintained, and a significant part of that maintenance is not optional: the energy certification regime for buildings (Decreto-Lei 101-D/2020) requires large commercial and service buildings to hold a maintenance plan and subjects air conditioning and ventilation systems above 70 kW to periodic inspection. On top of that sits the European regime for fluorinated gases, which imposes regular leak checks on the equipment that contains them and can only be met by certified firms and certified technicians. The practical result is that a good HVAC firm lives on annual maintenance contracts, avenças, over an installed base it knows itself, with one-off work invoiced on top. Installation rises and falls with construction. Maintenance stays.

What the law requires

Anyone handling fluorinated gases in Portugal needs two certifications, not one. Decreto-Lei 145/2017 transposed the European regulation on fluorinated gases and requires the company to hold its own certificate and each technician to hold his, both valid for seven years. The competent authority is the Agência Portuguesa do Ambiente and the certificates are issued by bodies accredited by IPAC, among them CERTIF and EIC. The European regulation was recast in 2024 and now tightens the quotas on gases with the greatest greenhouse effect and bans some refrigerants in the servicing of equipment already installed. The rule that counts most in practice is a simple one: certification is required when the service is provided to third parties. An in-house team looking after its own equipment falls outside it; any firm doing maintenance for clients falls inside. At the date of the last published edition of the EIC register, 16 January 2026, 430 certified entities were listed across the country. This is not a market you enter in a month.

On top of that comes the rest of the licensing. To carry out installation works a contractor's licence issued by IMPIC, the alvará, is required, in the 4th category, and the class of the alvará limits the value of work the firm may quote for. On the technicians' side, the building energy certification regime created credentials of its own, today governed by Decreto-Lei 102/2021, and every act of installing, replacing or upgrading a technical system in a building covered by it has to be carried out by someone who holds them. If the heating runs on gas, the Direção-Geral de Energia e Geologia comes in, which keeps the national register of gas installation companies. And if the work touches fire safety, as it does in smoke control and in the ventilation of escape routes, the fire safety regime for buildings comes in, together with registration of the company with the Autoridade Nacional de Emergência e Proteção Civil and a named responsible technician for each category of equipment. This is where the barrier to entry shows: it is not capital, and it is not equipment. It is the years of paperwork, examinations and trained people that nobody buys overnight.

Where it is going

Half of Portugal's residential buildings were built before 1981 (INE, Censos 2021). They went up in a country with no energy performance rules, many with no heating or cooling system foreseen at all, and with building envelopes that would not pass today. That means two things at once for anyone working in air conditioning and ventilation. It means replacement, of equipment that has reached the end of its useful life and of solutions that no longer comply. And it means new installation, in buildings that never had anything. The work is not in new construction. It is in what is already standing.

50.2% of Portugal's residential buildings were built before 1981, 1,794,306 out of a total of 3,573,416. Source: INE, Censos 2021.

The sector is changing on three sides at once. On the equipment: 105,000 heat pumps were installed in Portugal in 2024, 8% more than the year before, and Portugal was one of only three European markets to grow that year (EHPA, Market Report 2025). On the refrigerant: the reduction of European quotas for fluorinated gases and the ban, from 2026, on using the gases with the greatest greenhouse effect in the servicing of air conditioning and heat pumps force a decision, one piece of equipment at a time, between adapting and replacing. And on labour: APIRAC puts the sector at around 25,000 jobs with a shortfall of around 5,000 technicians, and says firms are turning work away because they have nobody to do it (Human Resources Portugal, March 2025). Whoever has trained and certified technicians holds the scarcest asset in this business.

Why it interests us

It interests us because it is work that does not end. The share of revenue that comes from maintenance contracts repeats every year, in part because the law requires it, and it survives bad years better than new work does. It interests us because the barrier is real and it is one of competence, not of capital: the certifications, the licences and the trained technicians take years to build and cannot be bought from one day to the next. It interests us because it is a sector made of small, good firms, each with its own name and its own area, with no single firm dominating the market. And it interests us because demand comes from the building stock that already exists, not from a bet on new construction. These are companies to buy and keep, not to tidy up and pass on.

What we look for in a company, in numbers: what we look for.