Most refrigerant-compliance material is written for HVAC contractors, which makes it easy to assume the rules land on them. They don't. Read 40 CFR § 84.106 and almost every duty in it — the leak-rate calculation, the 30-day repair deadline, the inspection schedule, the records — is assigned to “the owner or operator.” Your servicing contractor is a technician under the same rule. Technicians have their own obligations. Yours don't transfer to them.
40 CFR § 84.102 — definition
Owner or operator means any person who owns, leases, operates, or controls any equipment, or who controls or supervises any practice, process, or activity that is subject to any requirement pursuant to this subpart.
“Leases” and “controls” are doing real work in that sentence. A tenant operating a walk-in, a property manager running the rooftop units, and a landlord who owns the equipment can all sit inside this definition — and the rule does not ask which of you has the maintenance contract.
§ 84.106(l)(4)
This is the single most misunderstood sentence in the rule, and it is the one that turns a tidy service relationship into an enforcement problem.
If the installation, service, repair, or disposal is done by someone other than the owner or operator, that person must provide a record containing the specified information to the owner or operator.
Your contractor owes you the record. You owe the EPA the file. “My HVAC company has all of that” is not a compliant answer — it's a description of where your records aren't. If that relationship ends, the file has to already be yours.
What you actually owe
Every one of these names the owner or operator in the regulation's own text.
When a covered appliance crosses its leak-rate threshold, § 84.106(d) gives the owner or operator 30 days to identify and repair the leaks — 120 where an industrial process shutdown is required. Your contractor performs the work. The deadline is addressed to you.
§ 84.106(l)(1) required you to determine the full charge of every appliance with 15 or more pounds of refrigerant by January 1, 2026, and to keep that record — owner identity, address, full charge and how it was determined, revisions, install date — until three years after the appliance is retired.
A repair closes on two verification tests, and § 84.106(l)(7) requires records of the dates and results of all of them. The successful follow-up test is the date your inspection schedule counts from — which means a missing record costs you more than paperwork.
The full walkthrough of who gets fined and why lives in owner or contractor — who does the EPA actually fine?
Precedent
Not with the contractors who serviced the equipment. Every one of these is a grocery chain that owned the racks.
Read the caveat honestly: these were brought under the older R-22 rules (Clean Air Act Title VI, 40 CFR part 82), not under subpart C, which only began applying to HFCs on January 1, 2026. What carries forward is the part that matters here — the duty ran to the owner, and what failed was the same two things subpart C now asks of you: repairing leaks promptly, and being able to produce the service records. Subpart C extends that structure to the HFCs in your equipment today.
The current statutory maximum under the Clean Air Act is $59,114 per violation per day administratively (40 CFR § 19.4). The settlements above are what the aggregate actually looks like when a portfolio of equipment goes untracked for years.
What the software does
Ref LeakLog is the owner's copy of the compliance record — built so that when an inspector asks, the answer is a document rather than a phone call to your HVAC company.
A unit takes a top-off, the leak rate is calculated against the federal threshold for its category, and a 30-day repair deadline appears — the same clock that, in the regulation, is addressed to you. No account needed to look.
Open the live demoA per-appliance compliance report: full charge and how it was determined, every refrigerant addition, every leak-rate calculation, the repair actions and the verification tests that closed them. Generated from the record, not retyped.
Open a sample reportFourteen days free, no card. Add your equipment, and the leak-rate math, the repair deadlines, and the records § 84.106(l) requires are kept in your name from the first service event forward.
Start Your Free TrialRef LeakLog is compliance software, not legal advice. Regulatory text on this page is quoted or closely paraphrased from 40 CFR part 84 subpart C as published on the eCFR; read the current text of § 84.106 for the controlling language.