I was once called out to a restaurant group whose head office had just signed a refrigeration contract for eleven sites. Good price, sensible-looking schedule, everything appeared to be in order. Six weeks later a condensing unit failed at their busiest branch and they discovered the contract covered labour only. The compressor was four thousand pounds, and it was theirs to pay. Nobody had lied to them. They just had not read what the word "maintenance" meant in that particular document.
That happens more often than it should, and it is rarely because somebody was careless. Refrigeration contracts use industry shorthand that means precise things to the people writing them and almost nothing to the person signing. This guide sets out what is actually inside one, where the money hides, and what changes when you are buying cover for twenty sites instead of one.
What you are actually buying
A maintenance contract is not really a promise that your fridges will not break. It is an agreement about three separate things, and confusing them is where most disputes start.
- Planned work. Scheduled visits where an engineer inspects, cleans, tests and adjusts the equipment. This is the preventative half, and it is the part that is genuinely predictable in cost.
- Reactive work. What happens when something breaks between planned visits. Attendance, diagnosis, and repair, each of which may be charged differently.
- Compliance work. Statutory leak checking and record keeping under the F-Gas rules, which is a legal duty sitting on you rather than on your contractor.
A cheap contract usually covers the first one properly, prices the second one separately, and quietly assumes somebody else is handling the third. That is not dishonest. It is just a different product from the one most buyers think they are getting.
The cover levels, and what each one really means
Almost every refrigeration contract in the UK sits in one of four bands. The names vary between contractors, which is exactly why comparing two quotes on price alone tells you very little.
| Cover level | Planned visits | Labour on breakdowns | Parts | Refrigerant |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Inspection only | Included | Charged | Charged | Charged |
| Labour only | Included | Included | Charged | Usually charged |
| Parts and labour | Included | Included | Included, often with exclusions | Often capped |
| Fully inclusive | Included | Included | Included | Included |
Fully inclusive contracts are the least common, and for good reason. A contractor pricing one has to carry the risk of a compressor failure on kit they did not install and cannot see the history of, so they either price it high or write exclusions that bring it back towards parts and labour anyway. On an older estate, the honest answer is often that a labour-only contract plus a sensible capital replacement plan beats paying a premium for cover that excludes the components most likely to fail.
What matters is that you know which band you are in. If a quote does not say, ask, and get the answer in the document rather than in an email.
The exclusions that catch people out
This is where I would spend most of my reading time. The scope section tells you what you are buying, but the exclusions tell you what you will end up paying for.
Refrigerant
Gas is the one that surprises people most, because the price has moved so much. Refrigerant is often excluded outright, or included up to a fixed weight per year. If your estate still runs on an HFC being squeezed by the quota phase-down, that exclusion is a live financial risk rather than a technicality. Our guide to the R410A phase-out in the UK covers why those prices have behaved the way they have.
Worth knowing too: repeatedly topping a system up is not maintenance, it is a leak going unrepaired. A contract that includes generous refrigerant allowances but no leak repair obligation is arguably the wrong incentive.
Consumables and what counts as one
Filters, belts and door seals are usually consumables. Fair enough. The argument starts over items that sit near the boundary, like contactors, fan motors and controllers. Get a list. A contract that says "consumable items excluded" without defining them leaves the definition to whoever is invoicing.
Out-of-hours attendance
Most contracts price planned visits during normal working hours and charge an uplift for anything else. If you run a business that cannot let an engineer near the kit until after service finishes, then "out of hours" is your normal, and it needs to be in the base price rather than in the extras.
Consequential loss
Read this one carefully. Almost every contract in the sector excludes liability for stock loss and lost trade. That is standard and it is not unreasonable, given a contractor cannot control what you store or how much it is worth. But it does mean the financial exposure from a failure stays with you, which is the real argument for spending more on prevention. We have written separately on when a commercial fridge is worth repairing rather than replacing, and stock exposure is a big part of that calculation.
Response times, and how to read them honestly
Every contract has a response clause and most buyers read it too quickly. There are three different clocks and they are frequently conflated.
| Term | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Response | Time to acknowledge the call and confirm attendance. Sometimes just a phone call. |
| Attendance | Time until an engineer is physically on site. |
| Rectification | Time until the equipment is working again. Almost never guaranteed, because parts availability is outside anyone's control. |
A four-hour "response" that means somebody rings you back is a very different product from a four-hour attendance. When you are comparing tenders, normalise every bid to the same definition before you compare the numbers, or you will pick the one with the loosest wording.
Be suspicious of anyone guaranteeing rectification times on equipment they have never seen. Nobody can promise that a fifteen-year-old cabinet with a discontinued controller will be running again by lunchtime. When we agree cover with a customer, we set out a realistic arrival window based on where the site is and what the kit is, and we would rather have an honest conversation about that up front than write a number nobody can hit.
Where F-Gas compliance sits, and why it is not optional
This is the part that gets delegated by accident. Under the retained F-Gas Regulation, the duty to have equipment leak checked falls on the operator, defined in Article 2 of Regulation (EU) No 517/2014 as "the natural or legal person exercising actual power over the technical functioning of products and equipment covered by this Regulation". In plain terms, that is almost always you, not your contractor.
The frequencies are set by refrigerant charge measured in tonnes of CO₂ equivalent, not by kilograms:
| Charge size | Minimum check frequency | With automatic leak detection |
|---|---|---|
| 5 to under 50 tonnes CO₂e | Every 12 months | Every 24 months |
| 50 to under 500 tonnes CO₂e | Every 6 months | Every 12 months |
| 500 tonnes CO₂e or more | Every 3 months | Every 6 months |
Records have to be kept for at least five years and produced to the regulator on request. A good contract makes the leak check schedule explicit, names who holds the records, and gives you access to them without having to ask nicely. A poor one leaves it as an assumption. For the full picture, our guide to the UK F-Gas regulations goes through the obligations in detail.
What changes when you have twenty sites
Single-site contracts and estate contracts are different animals. Once you are buying across a portfolio, four things start to matter more than the hourly rate.
The asset register is the contract
If nobody has a complete list of what is installed, where, and how old it is, then every quote you receive is guesswork and every invoice is unarguable. A proper register records make, model, serial, refrigerant type and charge, install date and location for every piece of kit. It is dull work and it is the single highest-return thing an estate can do. Without it you cannot calculate CO₂e, which means you cannot know your leak check frequencies, which means you cannot be confident you are compliant.
Consistency of engineer
The economics of a national contract push towards whoever is nearest. That is efficient and it is also why the fourth engineer to visit a site starts the diagnosis from scratch. Ask how many engineers will realistically cover your sites and whether visit history follows the asset.
Reporting you can act on
Ask for reactive spend broken down by site and by asset, not just a monthly total. The pattern in that data is where the money is. One site generating a third of your callouts is a capital problem being paid for out of the maintenance budget, and you cannot see it in a summary figure.
A defined escalation path
Who do you ring when the normal route has not worked, and at what point does that become somebody's problem rather than a ticket. Agree it before you need it.
The maintenance standard worth referencing
If you want an independent yardstick for what planned visits should include, SFG20, published by BESA, is the one the FM industry uses. It carries over eighty air conditioning and refrigeration task schedules covering chillers, cold rooms and food storage, compressors, condensers and control panels, and each schedule sets out the task, the frequency, the skill level required and how critical it is.
You do not need to run your contract on SFG20 to make use of it. Simply asking a bidder to map their planned visit content against the relevant schedules tells you a great deal about how seriously they take the work.
Questions worth asking before you sign
- Which cover band is this, and where is that written in the document?
- What exactly is excluded, with consumables listed rather than described?
- Is refrigerant included, capped, or charged, and at what point does a leak become a repair obligation?
- Does "response" mean a phone call or an engineer on site?
- Who holds the F-Gas records, and can I export them myself?
- Are planned visits priced during my trading hours or outside them?
- What happens to the price at renewal if reactive spend has been low?
- Can I see reactive spend by asset, not just by site?
If a contractor cannot answer those quickly and in writing, that itself is the answer.
The honest summary
A refrigeration contract is a risk-sharing document dressed up as a service schedule. The cheapest one transfers the least risk, which is fine as long as you know that going in and have a capital budget behind it. The expensive one is only worth it if the exclusions are narrow enough to actually shift the exposure.
What I would say after twenty years of servicing London commercial kit is that the operators who spend the least over a five-year window are rarely the ones who negotiated hardest on the annual fee. They are the ones who kept a clean asset register, fixed leaks properly instead of topping up, and replaced the three worst performing units before those units chose their own moment.
If you are reviewing refrigeration cover across more than one site, it is worth talking it through before you go out to tender. We are happy to look at an existing schedule and tell you what it actually covers, and you can see how we structure planned refrigeration servicing or ask us for a quote directly.
About the author: Ali Elm runs Be Cool Refrigeration & Air Conditioning, a family-run London firm that has been installing, servicing and repairing commercial refrigeration and air conditioning since 2004. His F-Gas certified team has delivered more than 2,000 projects across London and the South East.
Written by
Ali Elm
Ali is the Head of Operations at Be Cool Refrigeration with over a decade of hands-on experience in HVAC and commercial refrigeration. He oversees every installation, repair, and maintenance project, making sure the work meets the highest standards. Ali holds full F-Gas certification and has worked across residential, commercial, and industrial refrigeration systems throughout London and the South East. When he is not on site, he writes these guides to help business owners and homeowners understand their cooling systems better.