Quick Answer
Planned maintenance contracts turn one-off jobs into a base of monthly income that pays the wages whether the phone rings or not. UK margins on PPM work sit between 40 and 60 percent versus 15 to 25 percent on reactive callouts, and a tidy book of 200 boiler service plans at £120 a year is £24,000 of predictable revenue before you factor in the £1 to £3 of repair work each plan tends to pull through. The hard part is not the maintenance. It is the contract design, the pricing, and the discipline to keep selling them. Start with one tier, three customer segments, and a renewal workflow that runs without you.
Table of Contents
- Why PPM contracts now, and why most trades miss them
- The economics: why a service plan earns more than a callout
- Designing your first PPM contract: scope, frequency and exclusions
- Pricing the contract: the three-tier model that actually sells
- Selling without the cringe: the conversation that converts
- FSM software that actually runs PPM: Joblogic, Commusoft, BigChange
- AI for predictive scheduling and renewal automation
- The 90-day rollout: from zero contracts to a renewing book
- What UK tradespeople are saying
- Recommended videos
- Frequently asked questions
- My verdict
Joblogic
Commusoft
BigChange
ServiceM8
TradifyWhy PPM contracts now, and why most trades miss them
I spent twelve years running Elite Heating and Plumbing before I sold it. For the first six of those, our turnover looked like a heart rate monitor. November and December would batter the team with no-heat calls, then July would arrive and the diary would be empty for a week. I would lose sleep about wages.
The fix was not more marketing. It was a small, deliberately boring book of service contracts. Forty boiler service plans the first year. Then sixty. By year three we had 180 plans and the summer panic was gone.
Most UK trades businesses still run reactive. There are good reasons. Reactive work pays a premium per hour, customers are easier to win when something is broken, and a callout fee is satisfying in a way a monthly direct debit is not. But reactive work is the wrong shape for a growing business. You cannot hire confidently against income that disappears every May.
The market has also shifted. Customers who lived through the 2022 energy crisis and the 2024 boiler installation backlog now actively look for service plans. Landlords need gas safety records that turn up like clockwork. Small commercial sites, the local cafe, the dentist, the accountant's office, want a single number to call and a contract that says someone is responsible. That demand is real and most local trades are still ignoring it.
The economics: why a service plan earns more than a callout
The maths is what convinces sceptical engineers. Let me work it through plainly.
A reactive boiler callout in 2026 in most of the UK earns you between £90 and £140 for the first hour. Parts are extra, marked up 10 to 20 percent. Your gross margin sits at 15 to 25 percent once you strip out diesel, materials cost, the unpaid hour writing the quote, and the time the apprentice spent looking for the right Worcester Bosch part in the van.
A planned boiler service costs you 45 minutes of engineer time, one set of filters and a wash leather. The customer pays £120 for the year. Your direct cost is around £48. Gross margin is 60 percent. You did the work when you wanted to do it, on a Tuesday in August, with no emergency premium on parts because you knew what you needed before you turned up.
Now stack the second-order effects. The serviced boiler is 30 percent less likely to fail in the next 12 months than the unserviced one. That sounds bad for revenue. It is not. The customers on plans call you first when something does break, because they have a contract that says they will. You are not bidding against three other engineers on Checkatrade. You are the only quote in the building.
Across 200 residential plans at £120 a year, that base is £24,000 of guaranteed revenue. The pull-through repair work, the boiler swaps that follow, the new bathroom you got because you were already in their loft, runs at £1 to £3 per £1 of plan value. That same 200-customer book quietly produces another £24,000 to £72,000 of unscheduled work each year.
The valuation point is the one nobody talks about. When you eventually sell the business, your reactive customer list is worth roughly the same as a Yellow Pages from 1998. A book of 600 PPM contracts is what a buyer actually pays for. SFP Advisors numbers show HVAC firms with 40 percent or more recurring revenue sell for 6 to 10 times EBITDA. Demand-only firms go for 2 to 4 times. The book is the asset.
Designing your first PPM contract: scope, frequency and exclusions
Design the first contract simply. The temptation is to write a 14-page agreement to cover every eventuality. Don't. A short, plain contract sells. A long one ends up in a drawer.
The structure I used at Elite, and the one I still recommend to every plumbing and HVAC firm I work with, has four parts.
1. The covered asset
One boiler. Or one electrical installation. Or one air conditioning unit. Be specific. Make, model, serial number, location. Do not bundle the boiler with the unvented cylinder and the underfloor heating in the same contract on the first try. You will lose money on the complex ones because you priced for the average.
2. The scheduled visit
One visit per year for a standard residential boiler. Two for commercial heating. Quarterly for fire alarms. The visit list is concrete: combustion analysis, expansion vessel pressure, flue gas safety check, condensate trap clean, filter change. If your engineer cannot read the visit list back to you in 30 seconds, it is too vague.
3. What the plan includes beyond the visit
Priority callout, usually within 24 to 48 hours. A small parts allowance, perhaps the first £75 of parts free at the annual service. Telephone advice that does not get billed. A discount on labour for non-covered repairs, usually 10 to 15 percent.
4. What the plan does not include
This is the section people skip and regret. Write it down clearly. Limescale damage. Frost damage where the customer turned the heating off. Anything fitted by a third party before the contract started. Replacement of components past a certain age. Out-of-hours work, evenings, weekends, bank holidays, unless the customer is on the premium tier.
For electrical PPM the structure is the same but the scope and price scale up. A 2026 residential electrical maintenance plan covering an EICR every five years, an annual safety inspection and priority callout runs £180 to £350. A small commercial PPM contract covering a 25kVA distribution board, emergency lighting and a small fire alarm system sits at £500 to £1,200 per year. Elec-Mate's 2026 pricing data shows the full commercial range from £500 to £5,000 a year depending on asset count.
Pricing the contract: the three-tier model that actually sells
One price is bad. Two prices is worse. Three prices is the sweet spot, and behavioural economics has been telling sales teams this for thirty years.
Here is the model that works for a residential plumbing and heating book.
Bronze. Annual gas safety service. Telephone advice. 10 percent off non-covered labour. £108 to £132 per year, billed monthly at £9 to £11.
Silver. Everything in Bronze, plus priority callout within 48 hours, the first £50 of parts at no charge, and unlimited boiler resets over the phone before anyone has to drive. £180 to £240 per year, billed monthly at £15 to £20.
Gold. Everything in Silver, plus priority callout within 24 hours including evenings, £150 of parts free, and a free service on the unvented cylinder if there is one. £360 to £480 per year, billed monthly at £30 to £40.
Roughly 60 to 70 percent of customers pick Silver. About 15 percent take Gold. The remainder take Bronze. The Bronze tier exists so Silver looks reasonable. The Gold tier exists so Silver looks like a bargain. Neither is the product. Silver is the product.
| Feature | Bronze | Silver | Gold |
|---|---|---|---|
| Annual service | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Priority callout window | Best efforts | 48 hours | 24 hours, evenings |
| Parts allowance per year | £0 | £50 | £150 |
| Phone advice and boiler resets | Standard rate | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Discount on non-covered labour | 10% | 15% | 20% |
| Unvented cylinder service | Extra | Extra | Included |
| Monthly direct debit | £9-£11 | £15-£20 | £30-£40 |
For commercial contracts, the tiering is different. A small cafe with one gas boiler, one walk-in chiller and basic emergency lighting wants a single price for the year, broken into quarterly visits, with a fixed monthly direct debit. Drop the tiers and quote one number. Commercial buyers value certainty over choice.
Selling without the cringe: the conversation that converts
Most engineers hate selling. I get it. You are a tradesperson, not a double-glazing rep. The good news is the conversation that sells a PPM contract does not feel like selling. It feels like advice.
The pitch happens on the doorstep at the end of a paid job. The boiler is fixed. The customer is grateful. You are packing up. This is the moment.
What you say is something like this. "While I am here, can I ask, has anyone ever talked you through a service plan for this boiler? It is not a sales pitch. We have a few options that work out cheaper than a one-off call when something goes wrong. Want me to leave a sheet for you to look at?"
Three things matter in that sentence. You acknowledged it might sound like a sales pitch and disarmed it. You framed the plan as cheaper than the alternative, not as an additional cost. You asked permission to leave information instead of pushing them to decide.
The sheet you leave is the comparison table from the section above. One page. Bronze, Silver, Gold. A QR code that opens a payment link. A line at the bottom that says "we will call back next Friday to answer any questions". And then your office calls back next Friday, every time, without fail.
Conversion rate from this single workflow, in the businesses I have helped roll it out at, sits between 18 and 32 percent. If your average paid call is two a day per engineer and you run three engineers, that is 30 callouts a week. At 20 percent conversion you sign six new contracts a week. Six a week is 312 contracts in a year, and you have not spent a penny on marketing.
For commercial work, the conversation is different. You send a quarterly compliance review to anyone who has paid you for a fix in the last 18 months. It lists what they have spent on reactive work, what a PPM contract would have cost over the same period, and the gap. The gap is the close. When a small landlord realises she has spent £1,800 on three emergency callouts in 18 months and a PPM contract would have been £600 with all three included, the contract sells itself.
If you want a deeper read on the wider conversion and pricing toolkit, the FSM switching cost guide covers how the same workflow plugs into your job management software.
FSM software that actually runs PPM: Joblogic, Commusoft, BigChange
You can run your first 20 contracts in a spreadsheet. You cannot run 200 without software, and the difference between the right tool and the wrong one is several full days of admin per month.
Three UK platforms dominate the PPM end of the market. They are not the cheapest job management tools. They are the ones built for service contracts specifically.
Joblogic
Joblogic is the most PPM-native of the three. It maps to SFG20 task schedules out of the box, which matters if your customers are commercial. Contracts can have multiple sites, multiple assets, fixed invoice billing or per-visit billing, and the system flags renewals 60 days out without you doing anything. UK pricing in 2026 sits in three tiers. Standard, Premium and Enterprise, per user. Realistic budget is £79 to £129 per user per month plus an implementation fee of £500 to £2,000. For a four-engineer firm that lands at roughly £400 a month.
Commusoft
Commusoft is the tool I recommend most often for residential PPM books that want commercial growth. Drag-and-drop dispatch is solid, PPM scheduling auto-generates jobs against contracts, and the customer portal lets your homeowners book their service themselves. They do not publish public pricing. Expect £45 to £95 per user per month after a sales call, with monthly rolling licences for seasonal staff and daily licences for subcontractors. There is no avoiding the demo call. Insist on a 30-day pilot before you sign anything.
BigChange
BigChange JobWatch is the heaviest of the three. Best when you have a vehicle fleet and a strong tracking requirement on top of PPM. Pricing is per vehicle, not per user. Vehicle tracking is £14.95 per month, JobWatch is £69.95 per vehicle per month, and JobWatch Plus is £99.95. Group-job templates make pre-planned maintenance routes faster, which matters at scale. Below 10 vehicles it is overkill.
One thing all three handle properly and most simpler tools do not. Contract-level invoicing. You set up the £15-per-month direct debit once. The software runs the recurring charge, generates the receipt, marks the contract as paid, and triggers the visit job when due. The day you stop doing that yourself in a spreadsheet, you get an extra hour back in the evening. Multiplied by 250 working days, that is your kid's school nativity, your wife's birthday, and the football you keep missing.
AI for predictive scheduling and renewal automation
I am going to be honest with you. Most of what is sold as "AI maintenance scheduling" in 2026 is glorified rules-based scheduling with a chatbot stuck on the front. That is not nothing. But it is not magic either.
The places AI is earning its keep on PPM right now are three.
1. Predictive renewal timing
The model looks at when a customer historically responds to renewal messaging, what time of day they open emails, and how long they wait before they say yes. Then it schedules the renewal nudge to land at the right moment. Commusoft and Joblogic both run versions of this in 2026. Renewal rates in the firms using it well are running 8 to 14 percentage points higher than the manual baseline. That is the difference between a 75 percent retention rate and an 87 percent one. On a 300-contract book, it is 36 extra contracts retained.
2. Predictive maintenance windows
If your kit has smart sensors, and a lot of new commercial boilers do, the AI can spot the pattern that precedes a failure. Pressure drop combined with rising flue gas temperature, for example. The system flags it before the boiler dies and pushes a maintenance visit forward by a fortnight. The customer thinks you are a wizard. You think the visit was on the schedule anyway. Both are right.
3. Conversational renewals
An AI agent talks to the customer about their renewal in the way you would. Confirms the address. Confirms the boiler is still the same one. Updates the direct debit if it changed. Answers questions like "is the heat exchanger included this year". This used to take 12 minutes per renewal. It now takes 90 seconds with no human time at all. The cost gap is widening fast between firms that automate this and firms that do not.
The 90-day rollout: from zero contracts to a renewing book
I have helped a few dozen plumbing and HVAC firms move from zero PPM contracts to a working book. The pattern that works is always the same shape. Three months, three focuses.
Month one: build the asset
Write the contract. One tier to start, the Silver tier from above. Write the doorstep script. Write the comparison sheet. Set up the direct debit collection in GoCardless or Stripe. Get the contract reviewed by a solicitor. The Federation of Master Builders has a template that costs £45 and saves you four hours of drafting.
Then go through the last 24 months of customers. Mark every one who paid for a repair or installation. Those are your warm targets. Roughly 30 to 40 percent of them will sign up if you call within six months of the work. The percentage drops fast after that.
Month two: sell to the warm list
Two paths run in parallel. Path A is the doorstep pitch on every paid job. Path B is a phone call to every customer on the warm list. The script is the same. "We have changed how we look after customers like you and I wanted to talk you through it. Five minute call. Tuesday or Thursday?"
Path A converts at 18 to 32 percent. Path B converts at 12 to 22 percent. Your target for month two is 25 to 40 signed contracts. If you get fewer than 15, the script or the price is wrong. Pause and fix it before month three.
Month three: build the renewal engine
Now the boring part. The first contracts you signed in month one are 60 days old. They are not renewing yet, but the system that renews them needs to exist before they hit twelve months. Set up the automated reminders at 60 days out, 30 days out, and seven days out. Set up the failed-direct-debit retry. Set up the win-back call for anyone who cancels.
If you do not build the renewal engine in month three, month thirteen will hurt. I have seen firms hit 200 contracts in year one and then watch 35 percent of them lapse in year two because nobody followed up. That is £8,400 of contract revenue plus £8,000 to £25,000 of pull-through gone, because nobody pressed three buttons.
For the underlying financial discipline this requires, the trades business benchmarking guide is worth your time. The PPM book is the line on the page that moves the most other lines in the right direction.
What UK tradespeople are saying
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Is it worth paying for boiler cover?
Which?
Frequently asked questions
Planned Preventative Maintenance is the commercial term. Service plan is the residential consumer term. The structure is the same. Scheduled visits, defined scope, fixed price. PPM contracts tend to be longer documents because they are sold to facilities managers who need to evidence compliance. Service plans for homeowners are usually a one-page summary with a direct debit on the back.
No, the rules are the same as for any other service revenue. Most small UK trades businesses cross the £90,000 VAT threshold within 18 months of starting a PPM book because the recurring revenue compounds. Plan for that. Build VAT into the price from contract one, even if you are not registered yet. Raising prices later annoys customers.
Your contract should exclude replacement of the asset itself. The PPM covers the maintenance and small repairs. A full boiler replacement is a separate quote. Be clear about this in the exclusions on page one. The good news is the customer will almost always buy the replacement from you because you have the relationship. That is the pull-through revenue working.
120 to 180 signed contracts in year one is realistic if every engineer pitches on every paid job and the office runs the warm-list call campaign in month two. Year two, you should retain 85 to 92 percent of those and add another 150 to 200. By year three you have a book of 400 plus that produces £60,000 to £100,000 a year of recurring revenue before pull-through.
Yes, but not how you might think. Landlords get a higher price because of the gas safety certificate requirement and the often shorter notice for access. A landlord plan is typically £180 to £260 against a homeowner plan at £150 to £200 for the same boiler. The work is the same. The compliance overhead is not.
Allow cancellation with 30 days notice and pro-rata the year. Do not lock customers in. Fighting a cancellation costs more in reputation than the lost contract is worth, and a customer who feels trapped will leave a review you will spend twelve months trying to undo. Make it easy to leave and most of them will come back when they realise reactive callouts cost more.
For commercial assets with sensors fitted, yes. For residential gas boilers without smart sensors, no. The data the model needs is not available from the asset, so the prediction is guesswork wrapped in confident language. Use AI for renewal automation and customer comms where it earns its keep today, and leave the predictive maintenance hype until your customer base is mostly on connected kit.
My verdict
Reactive work is a treadmill. You can run it forever and still wake up in May worried about wages. Service contracts are not glamorous, they are not exciting on Instagram, and nobody talks about them on trades podcasts. But they are the single change that turns a stressful business into a calm one. Start with one tier. Sell to your warm list. Build the renewal engine in month three. By year three you have something worth selling, and in the meantime you sleep better. That is the whole pitch.
