If you install a major brand of equipment, there may be a marketing budget sitting in your name that you have never spent.
Not a discount, not a rebate on a future order. Money accrued against what you already bought, intended to be spent on advertising, and it expires at the end of the program year.
Reported estimates suggest more than half of eligible business owners do not use all of what is available to them, and that substantial sums go unclaimed and expire annually.
How the mechanic works
Three steps, consistent across nearly every program.
You accrue a balance as a percentage of qualifying purchases. The rate varies enormously by manufacturer, product, and dealer tier. Daikin's 2026 contractor program accrues anywhere from 1% on thermostats to 9% on its premium equipment line. American Standard accrues monthly at around 2.15% of purchases. Goodman accrues 1 to 6% depending on product, with a minimum annual purchase threshold to qualify at all.
The program pays part of an approved expense. Many traditional programs use a 50/50 split. Lennox reimburses up to 60% of a co-branded activity from earned funds. Trane's reimbursement runs 50 to 70% depending on dealer tier. Some accrual-style programs require no dealer match at all.
You submit proof and get reimbursed, usually as a payment or a credit against your next order.
So the size of the pot is a function of what you buy, and the share they cover is a function of your tier and their policy. Neither is an industry average. Both are in your specific program document.
A worked example
One manufacturer publishes its tiers plainly: 2% of annual sales at the entry tier, 3% at the middle, 5% at the top.
A contractor at the middle tier doing $200,000 a year in that brand accrues $6,000 in marketing funds. At the top tier on $500,000, it is $25,000.
Then apply a 50% reimbursement rate and that $6,000 balance supports $12,000 of actual marketing. You are not getting free advertising. You are getting your budget matched.
What it typically covers
Broader than most contractors assume. Published program lists include newspaper, radio and television advertising, billboards, direct mail, signage, apparel and uniforms, promotional items, fairs and shows, search engine marketing, search engine optimisation, and website development.
That last group matters. Co-op is frequently thought of as a traditional-media programme, and a good deal of it now covers digital work, including the website itself.
Why so much of it goes unused
Two reasons, both mundane.
Nobody at the business knows the balance. It lives on a distributor statement, inside a dealer portal, on a rewards dashboard, or only in the head of your account rep. It almost never lives in the marketing budget, which means the person deciding what to spend has no idea it exists.
The rules feel like homework. Pre-approvals, proof-of-performance photographs, logo usage guidelines, and claim windows all sit between you and the money. Each one is small. Together they are enough friction that the claim never gets made.
The deadline trap
This is the detail worth acting on, and it is specific.
The claim deadline usually arrives before the expiry date, and people plan against the wrong one.
The clearest published example comes from a 2026 Canadian dealer policy: funds not used by December 31 are lost, but every claim must be submitted by December 15 and within 60 days of the vendor's invoice.
Read that carefully. A campaign you run in early October has an invoice-driven deadline in early December regardless of the year-end date. Work backwards from the claim window, not from expiry.
Mid-September is a reasonable time to be reading this, because it leaves enough runway to run something, invoice it, and claim it before the window closes.
The negotiating point nobody mentions
Co-op allocations are not fixed, and there is a specific moment when they are most generous.
Industry practitioners note that the most generous allocations of marketing support often happen in the first year or two of a new manufacturer or distributor partnership. Which means the moment you are considering changing brands is the moment to raise the subject, because that is when your business is worth the most to them.
The other underused route is your distributor rather than the manufacturer. Distributors hold market development funds of their own and have their own reasons to want brand loyalty from you. They are also considerably easier to get on the phone.
What to actually do
Find out what you have. One call to your distributor rep and one to your manufacturer rep. The question is: what is my accrued balance, what is my reimbursement rate, and when does it expire. Ten minutes.
Get the program document in writing. Reimbursement rates, eligible activities, pre-approval requirements, logo rules, and both deadlines. Averages are useless here; only your policy matters.
Plan spending against the balance rather than against your budget. If you have $6,000 available at 50%, then $12,000 of marketing costs you $6,000. That changes what is affordable.
Submit early. The claim process involves paperwork and the people processing it are busiest at year end.
A caveat on sources: much of the published material on co-op is written by agencies that manage co-op claims for a fee, and they have an interest in the topic looking complicated. The manufacturer program details above are verifiable in the programs themselves. The complexity is real but navigable, and you do not necessarily need somebody to navigate it for you.
The honest read
This is one of the few genuinely free things in local marketing, in the sense that it is money already earned rather than money to be found.
It is also the most reliably ignored, because it requires a phone call to somebody you already know, and the friction of the claim process is just high enough to keep getting postponed.
Make the call this week. Whatever the answer, you will know something about your own business you did not know this morning.