Arizona HVAC license classes, side by side.

Refrigeration. The ROC’s C-39 class allows installing, altering, and repairing refrigeration and evaporative cooling systems along with wet, dry, or radiant heating and ventilation systems. C-58 allows warm air heating, gas fired furnaces and space heaters, ventilation, and evaporative cooling units, with the duct work, controls, fuel piping, and testing and balancing that go with them, but not refrigeration. So a shop that sets condensers and charges systems needs the C-39 side; a furnace and swamp cooler shop can hold C-58. We read the class on the record rather than deciding which one fits your work.

C-79 is the commercial air conditioning and refrigeration class including solar, and R-39 is the residential class including solar, which the ROC says covers comfort air conditioning with or without solar equipment. The distinction matters when you install solar collectors, piping, and storage as part of the cooling or heating system rather than subcontracting them. For a coverage review, solar work raises its own questions about roofs, the equipment before it is set, and who carries the installation float, so we ask about it directly even when your class already allows it.

Not what you must carry. Arizona requires the license bond for the license and workers’ comp with the first employee, whatever your class. What the class changes is the work we quote and the questions the underwriter asks. A commercial C-39 or C-79 shop brings rooftop units, contract requirements, and completed operations questions. A C-58 shop brings furnaces and evaporative coolers in occupied homes. A dual CR license brings both, and the submission has to say how the revenue splits between them.

Under the current rules the ROC no longer accepts applications or issues new licenses in the R-39R gas refrigeration, temperature control systems, warm air heating and evaporative cooling, evaporative cooling and ventilators, and pre-cooler subclassifications. Licenses issued under those codes stay on the record, so an older license can still show one, and the ROC says the R-39 scope includes every R-39R subclassification. When your license carries a legacy code, we map it to the current scope on the submission so the underwriter reads the work rather than the code.

The ROC puts ventilation systems, including duct work, air filtering devices, controls, and control piping, inside the C-39 and C-58 scopes, and it lists sheet metal separately as C-45 with its own dual form. So routine duct work that is part of the system you install sits inside the air conditioning class, and fabricating sheet metal as its own line of business is the separate class. We do not draw that line for a specific job; the ROC does. What we ask is how much of your revenue is duct and metal work, because it changes the underwriting questions.

The ROC Contractor Search on roc.az.gov shows every licensed contractor’s classification, status, qualifying party, and bond, and it is the same record we pull before a quote. The ROC’s own guidance to consumers is to check that a contractor’s license class allows the work in the contract, so general contractors and property managers use the same lookup when they vet a bid. The sources on this page link to the ROC classification table and the consumer guidance where the search lives.