Chicago's heat ordinance and the HVAC no-heat call

In Chicago, a winter no-heat call from a rental can have a legal deadline behind it. The city’s heat ordinance makes landlords who heat several apartments from one plant keep them at 68°F by day from September 15, and a tenant who gives written notice can withhold part of the rent after 24 hours. Win those calls with a website written for that caller, the city’s old boilers and the neighborhoods people name.

In Chicago, the no-heat call has a legal clock

The Chicago Bar Association walked through the rule in September 2026. Where units are heated from a plant shared by more than one unit, they must reach 68°F from 8:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. and 66°F from 10:30 p.m. to 8:30 a.m. between September 15 and June 1, under Municipal Code section 14X-8-802.2.2. A unit with its own furnace falls under section 14X-8-802.2 instead: it needs permanent heating equipment able to hold 68°F when it is -7°F outside, and the owner may have the tenant pay for the fuel. The city can fine “$500 to $1000 per day, per violation”, and each unit counts separately. Buildings that heat and cool with the same system may hold 64°F in the shoulder weeks: from September 15 to October 31 until the first night below 45°F, and from April 1 once a day tops 75°F.

The tenant has remedies too, under section 5-12-110(f) of the Residential Landlord and Tenant Ordinance. Once the tenant gives the landlord written notice, they can buy heat and deduct the cost from the rent “upon presentation to the landlord of paid receipts.” If the landlord does not fix it within 24 hours of the notice, they can withhold part of the rent, and if it lasts more than 72 hours, end the lease, unless the utility provider caused the failure. That ordinance does not cover owner-occupied buildings of six units or fewer, though the heat ordinance’s fines still apply there.

So the person who calls you at 6 a.m. in January may not be cold at all. It may be the owner of a two-flat whose tenant just texted, who now needs three things: someone who can come today, a written record of the visit, and a fix that holds.

Who is searching at 6 a.m. in January

The winter search is the bigger one in this city. From inside Chicago, “furnace repair” gets about 3,600 searches a month against 2,900 for “ac repair”, and “hvac chicago” gets about 1,300, according to a LocalBiz analysis of DataForSEO data from November 2026.

The same pull looked at the top 20 Google Maps results for “ac repair” as seen from Chicago. Seven of the 20 linked no website at all, and six showed no street address, the way a service-area business is set up. That was a cooling search, not a heating one, so treat it as a picture of the local field: a third of the businesses a Chicagoan sees on the map give them nowhere to read before they call.

Cold makes the search urgent. On January 30 and 31, 2019, CBS Chicago reported that surface temperatures fell to minus 23 and wind chills to 50 below. A caller on a morning like that wants to see three things in the first screen: the job they have (“no heat”, “boiler not firing”), the part of the city you reach today, and a phone number or a form.

Boiler or furnace: write for the system in the basement

Chicago’s houses are old. The Census Bureau’s 2019 to 2023 American Community Survey counts 496,256 of the city’s 1,268,199 housing units, 39.1%, as built in 1939 or earlier. The Chicago Architecture Center says two-, four- and six-flats make up “more than 30 percent” of the housing stock, most built between 1900 and 1920. It counts more than 80,000 bungalows, a third of the city’s single-family homes, each “one and one-half stories above a basement.”

Gas does most of the heating. The same survey has 78.0% of occupied homes heated with utility gas and 17.6% with electricity. It does not say what kind of system burns the gas, so this is our reading rather than a count: in a city built this early, a real share of your no-heat calls will be boilers and radiators, and a furnace-only website misses them.

Give each system its own page, written in the caller’s words:

• Boiler repair: radiators cold on one floor, banging pipes, a pilot that will not stay lit, low water on the sight glass.
• Furnace repair: blower runs but no heat, short cycling, the furnace in a bungalow basement that the previous owner installed.
• Two-flat heating: one boiler or two furnaces, who pays for the gas, which tenant’s thermostat controls it.

The caller does not search “hydronic heating service”. They type “radiators not getting hot”, and your page should use those words.

A page for the landlord with a heat complaint

The ordinance gives a landlord page a reason to exist. Write it for the owner of a two-flat or a six-flat who has a tenant without heat:

1. Say at the top that you take no-heat calls from landlords and property managers, with your real hours in the heating season.
2. Say how soon you can arrive, and only what you actually keep.
3. Say what they get on paper: a dated invoice that shows when you arrived, what you found and what you fixed. The ordinance runs on dates and receipts, so that paper matters to them.
4. Say whether you service occupied units, and how you arrange access with tenants.
5. Give them a short form for the address, the number of units and the tenant’s symptoms, next to the phone number.

Do not give legal advice on the page. Link to the city’s heat information, quote the temperatures with the date you checked them, and leave the rest to their lawyer.

Neighborhood names Chicagoans actually type

The city’s official dataset lists 77 community areas: Logan Square, Lincoln Park, Lake View, Edgewater, West Town, Portage Park and the rest. Residents also use names that are not on that list. Wicker Park, Bucktown and Andersonville sit inside community areas, and residents call them by those names.

For a website, that means:

• Name pages the way residents do. “Boiler repair in Wicker Park” beats “Boiler repair in West Town” for the people who live there, and the page can say it covers the West Town area.
• Build a page only where you take the work and can say something specific: the housing on those blocks, how fast you arrive, the jobs you have done there.
• Treat the suburbs as separate towns. Oak Park and Evanston are their own municipalities with their own searches, so a Chicago page will not cover them.

Your Google Business Profile has its own limits. Google allows “up to 20 service areas” and says the area “shouldn’t be more than about 2 hours of driving time” from your base. A website has no such cap, which is why the site, not the profile, carries the neighborhood pages. The wider HVAC playbook, by season, is in local SEO for HVAC companies. For the trade overview, see the HVAC industry page.

The repair becomes a replacement: the rebate line changes at the city line

A worn-out boiler that fails in January can turn into a replacement quote. The rebate that helps close it depends on which side of the city line the house sits.

Peoples Gas serves the city of Chicago, and Nicor serves more than 650 suburbs, according to the Citizens Utility Board. Read in November 2026, the Peoples Gas residential rebate page listed:

The page limits the rebates to single-family homes, two-flats, and individually metered condos or townhomes, and says equipment “must be new, fully installed”. Two-flats are named, which matters in this city.

On your website, put the Peoples Gas figures on your Chicago replacement pages and keep suburban pages to the program that serves that town. Date each line (“checked November 2026”), because a rebate quoted after it ends is a promise you cannot keep.

What to check after the first cold snap

The first freeze tells you whether the site works. In the week after it, look at:

• Form requests and calls that mention a page. Ask callers which page they saw. Count requests from the landlord page and the boiler page separately.
• Which neighborhoods sent work. If Logan Square sent jobs and Lake View sent none, the Lake View page needs more that is specific to Lake View, or less of your time.
• Where each page ranks. Search “boiler repair” plus each neighborhood you serve and note where your page sits.
• What the season changed. If the city amends the heat ordinance again, update the landlord page that week.

LocalBiz tracks where your website ranks for each keyword in each town or neighborhood you serve, checked monthly in the regular results (not the map pack), so you can see which no-heat pages earn their place before next September.