Contractor Financing: What the 0% Offer Actually Costs You

Financing works. On jobs above roughly five thousand dollars it reliably moves close rates, because a homeowner comparing a monthly payment to their current utility bill is answering a much easier question than one comparing a cash total to savings they do not have.

Reported lift is 20 to 40 percent on jobs over $5,000, with 10 to 18 points specifically on HVAC system replacements above $8,000. Those figures come from companies selling contractor services, so treat the precision with caution, but the direction is consistent and the mechanism is obvious.

What is less obvious is what it costs you, and the answer has a shape worth understanding before you pick a provider.

How it works

A third-party lender pays you in full, typically within one to three business days. The homeowner repays the lender over time. You pay a merchant fee, sometimes called a dealer fee, out of the job.

You are not lending anything and you carry no credit risk. You are buying a closed deal at a discount.

The fee scales inversely with how good the offer is

This is the part that catches people, and once you see it the whole category makes sense.

Standard APR products, where the customer pays something like 9.99%, cost the contractor very little. Often zero to three percent.

Short 0% promotions, six months or so, run around 4 to 5 percent.

Twelve month 0% APR commonly lands at 7 to 12 percent.

Extended 0% promotions, eighteen to twenty-four months and beyond, run from roughly 6 percent at the cheaper end up to 15 or 17 percent, with deep promotional products reported as high as 26 percent.

Read that as a single sentence: the customer's 0% is your 7 to 15 percent. Somebody has to pay the interest, and when the offer says the customer does not, the answer is you.

Which reframes the decision. You are not choosing whether to offer financing. You are choosing how much margin to spend buying down a rate, and the most attractive offer is the most expensive one.

A worked example: a $13,000 HVAC job on an eighteen month 0% promotion at a 9 percent dealer fee costs $1,170 out of the payout. Most shops handle that by building the fee into the price book so the cash and financed prices match.

The providers, and how they differ

Wisetack charges a flat 3.9 percent on standard products, rising toward 9.9 percent on extended 0% promotions. No subscription, no setup fee, self-serve enrolment, and native integration inside Jobber, Housecall Pro, ServiceTitan and similar. Loan ceiling around $25,000, soft credit pull, with a reported approval rate near 74 percent.

GreenSky is the largest network, with a ceiling around $100,000 and enrolment that is invite-based rather than self-serve. Dealer fees are reported between 0.99 and 15 percent depending on product, with a typical figure around 7.4 percent. It also carries a documented CFPB regulatory history including a loan cancellation order and a large volume of unauthorised-loan complaints, and consumer review scores across the major platforms are poor.

Synchrony Home charges nothing on standard 9.99% APR products and 3.99 to 11.99 percent on deferred-interest promotions, with multi-tier programmes for specific manufacturer dealers.

Service Finance dominates HVAC and roofing dealer programmes at 7 to 11 percent on 0% promotions, and is frequently the default lender embedded in manufacturer dealer schemes.

Hearth works differently, charging an annual subscription of roughly $1,499 to $1,799 plus setup instead of per-transaction fees, with a much higher loan ceiling. That inverts the maths: expensive if you finance two jobs a year, cheap if you finance forty.

A caveat on sources: several of the detailed fee comparisons currently ranking are published by sites with an evident affiliate relationship to one of the providers, and the recommended option is reliably the one paying commission. The fee ranges above appear consistently across multiple independent sources. The rankings do not.

Deferred interest deserves a sentence of its own

Some 0% products are true zero-interest loans. Others are deferred interest, which is a different thing.

With deferred interest, if the customer does not clear the full balance within the promotional window, interest is charged retroactively from day one. Somebody who pays off 95 percent over twenty-three months can be billed interest on the entire original amount.

That is legal, disclosed, and widely misunderstood by consumers. It is also the product category behind a meaningful share of the regulatory history in this industry.

You do not have to offer it. If you do, know which product you are handing somebody, because you are the person who put it in front of them and yours is the name they will remember.

How to decide

Pick by the product mix you will actually sell. If most of your financed work will go out on standard APR, the flat-fee providers look expensive and the network providers look cheap. If you intend to lead with 0% promotions, the ordering reverses.

Check the ceiling against your average job. A $25,000 limit is irrelevant for service work and disqualifying for whole-home replacements.

Check whether it lives inside the tools you already use. Financing offered inside the quote converts better than financing offered as a separate link, because the moment it is a separate step it becomes a decision rather than an option.

Price it into the book. If the fee comes out of your margin unplanned, financing quietly makes your best jobs your worst ones. Build it in so the cash and financed prices match.

The honest read

Financing is one of the few things in this category with a genuinely direct line to revenue, because it removes the specific obstacle that kills large jobs: not whether the customer wants the work, but whether they can pay for it this month.

The cost is real and it is largest exactly where the sales benefit is largest. A 0% offer closes deals because it is worth something, and what it is worth is roughly what it costs you.