Your Contractor's Records Are Not Your Records: the § 84.106(l)(4) Handoff Every Building Owner Is Missing

Ask a building owner who keeps the EPA refrigerant paperwork for their rooftop units and walk-in coolers, and you'll get the same answer almost every time: "My HVAC company handles that."

It's a reasonable assumption. The contractor has the gauges, the certification card, and the service software. They wrote the ticket. Surely the compliance file lives wherever the tickets live.

The federal rule says otherwise — and it says it twice. Under 40 CFR Part 84, Subpart C, the duty to maintain the refrigerant records belongs to you, the owner or operator. Your contractor's legal duty is only to provide you a record at the end of the job. And here's the part almost nobody has noticed: the record they're required to provide doesn't include the two numbers an EPA inspector will ask about first — the appliance's full charge, and the leak rate calculated from the service.

If your compliance posture is "the contractor keeps it," you are one records request away from finding out what that assumption costs.

The Rule Names You, Not Them

Subpart C — the AIM Act leak-repair rule in force since January 1, 2026 — hangs nearly every obligation on a defined term, and the definition is broader than most people expect:

Own the building? You're in. Lease it and run the equipment? You're in. Property manager controlling the asset? You're in. The outside company that services the equipment is, in the rule's vocabulary, a technician — a different word carrying different (and much narrower) duties. We walked through the full liability split in our owner-or-contractor breakdown; the short version is that the repair clocks, the calculations, and the records all run against the owner's name.

The recordkeeping paragraph is explicit about who does the keeping:

Every numbered duty under that chapeau — thirteen categories of records — starts with the words "owners or operators must maintain." Not one of them starts with "the servicing contractor must maintain."

What You're Required to Have on File

Two record types matter most for a typical commercial building, and both are yours to keep.

The per-appliance file — § 84.106(l)(1). For every refrigerant-containing appliance holding 15 or more pounds — that's most walk-in coolers, refrigeration racks, and commercial rooftop units — you were required to determine its full charge by January 1, 2026 (or at installation, if newer) and keep a file with the owner's identity, the appliance's address, the full charge and the method used to determine it, any revisions to that number, and the installation date. This file doesn't follow the normal three-year clock: it must be kept until three years after the appliance is retired. It can outlive the roof it sits on.

Notice something about that file: no service call produces it. There is no version of "the contractor keeps it" for (l)(1), because it isn't a service record at all — it's an asset record, and it exists only if the owner creates it.

The per-event service record — § 84.106(l)(2). Every time an appliance with a 15-plus-pound charge is installed, serviced, repaired, or disposed of, a record must exist with eight fields:

1. The identity and location of the appliance;
2. The date of the work;
3. The part(s) worked on;
4. The type of work performed on each part;
5. The name of the person who did it;
6. The amount and type of refrigerant added (or removed, at disposal);
7. The full charge of the appliance; and
8. The leak rate and the method used to calculate it.

Keep those last two in view. They're about to matter.

What the Handoff Actually Delivers — and What It Doesn't

Here is the provision your contractor's duty lives in, in full:

Read the citation range carefully: (l)(2)(i) through (l)(2)(vi). Six fields, not eight. The contractor who services your equipment is federally required to hand you the who / what / when / where and the pounds of refrigerant added — and that's where their duty stops. The two fields that complete your record:

That's not sloppy drafting — it's the rule being consistent with itself. The leak-rate calculation duty in § 84.106(b) reads: "The owner or operator must calculate the leak rate every time refrigerant is added to an appliance." The calculation is your obligation, so the rule doesn't force your contractor to deliver it. The full charge lives in your (l)(1) appliance file, so the rule doesn't force them to deliver that either.

Put the two provisions together and the trap closes:

Even a contractor who does everything the regulation requires of them leaves you with a legally incomplete record. The handoff delivers six fields of an eight-field record — and the two missing fields are the ones the entire leak-repair rule turns on.

A good contractor will put the full charge and the leak rate on the paperwork anyway — many now structure their service agreements around exactly this. But when they do, understand it for what it is: a service to you, not their federal duty discharged instead of yours. If the number is missing, wrong, or never calculated, the EPA's question lands on your desk.

"But I'd Never Get Audited" Is Not a Strategy

The leak-repair duties that flow from those records are not theoretical. When a leak rate crosses the threshold — 20% for commercial refrigeration, 30% for industrial process, 10% for comfort cooling — § 84.106(d) gives the owner or operator 30 days to get it repaired, with verification tests to prove it held. Records are how you know the clock started, and how you prove you beat it.

Enforcement runs against owners, and the penalty schedule is set by statute: up to $59,114 per day, per violation administratively (capped at $472,901 per proceeding) and up to $124,426 per day in a judicial action — figures confirmed against the current 40 CFR § 19.4 penalty table. The biggest refrigerant enforcement action of this year — a proposed consent decree with roughly $100 million in mandated upgrades — was built in significant part on missing records, charged separately from the leaks themselves. The defendant was the equipment's owner. Its contractors weren't the ones in the caption.

And a federal inspector isn't even the most likely person to ask for your file. Refrigerant records now surface in property transactions, insurance reviews, and lender due-diligence — moments when "let me call my HVAC company and see what they have" is not an answer that closes.

What to Do About It This Week

1. Build the (l)(1) file first. List every appliance on your property with 15+ pounds of refrigerant. For each: full charge, how it was determined, installation date. If you don't know the full charge, your contractor can determine it — but the file is yours.

2. Demand the handoff on every invoice. The (l)(4) record — fields (i) through (vi) — is a federal requirement your contractor owes you at the end of every service call, not a courtesy. If your current paperwork says "topped off unit — 2 lbs," you are not receiving what the rule entitles you to.

3. Close the two-field gap explicitly. Ask for the full charge and the calculated leak rate on every refrigerant addition, in writing — or calculate it yourself from the pounds added (our leak-rate guide walks through the math). Either way, the completed eight-field record has to end up in your file.

4. Keep everything at least three years. Electronic is fine — the rule says so explicitly. The full retention breakdown covers all thirteen record categories, but the per-appliance file and the per-event service records are the spine.

The uncomfortable summary: your contractor's records are evidence that they did their job. Your records are evidence that you met a federal obligation. They can overlap. They are not the same thing, and only one of them has your name on it.