F-Gas Certification (Company & Engineer)
Two certificates, and most firms buy the wrong one first
What F-Gas covers
UK F-Gas regulations make it illegal to work on systems containing fluorinated greenhouse gases without certified individuals and a registered company. It applies to air conditioning, refrigeration and heat pump work, and it is enforced — this is environmental law, not a trade badge.
The thing that catches firms out is right there in the name of the scheme: there are two separate certifications, they are held by different entities, and one does not imply the other.
- The engineer holds a City & Guilds 2079 qualification, or equivalent.
- The company holds a registration with an approved certification body — Refcom, ACRIB or BESA among them.
A sole trader needs both, in two separate applications. A firm with four engineers needs four qualifications and one company registration. And a firm whose engineers are all qualified but whose company registration has lapsed is working illegally, which is the version of this that actually happens.
Budget around £450 for certification, though the split between the two parts varies by body.
The categories, which decide what you may touch
The engineer qualification is issued in categories, and the category has to match the work:
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Category I
All systems, no size limit. The full ticket, and the only one that covers everything.
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Category II
Non-hermetically sealed systems up to 3kg of refrigerant, plus hermetic systems. Adequate for a lot of domestic split AC work and not for much else.
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Category III
Hermetically sealed systems up to 6kg. Recovery only on those.
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Category IV
Refrigerant recovery only. Not installation, not maintenance.
Applying for a category below the work you intend to take is the single most common error, and unlike most application mistakes it does not surface as a rejection. It surfaces as a job you are not lawfully allowed to complete.
What else is required
Certified recovery equipment. You must own or have access to calibrated, certified recovery kit. Releasing F-Gas to atmosphere is illegal, and this is the part enforcement actually looks at.
An F-Gas record-keeping system. A log for every system you work on — refrigerant type, quantity added and removed, leak checks — required for systems at or above 5 tonnes CO₂ equivalent.
What you have to keep doing
Statutory leak checks, on a schedule set by system size: systems above 5 tonnes CO₂e annually, above 50 tonnes every six months, above 500 tonnes every three months.
Annual company registration renewal. Note the asymmetry, because it is the thing that lapses: the individual engineer qualifications do not expire. The company registration does, every year. So a firm can be entirely competent, entirely qualified, and entirely unlawful, all at once, because nobody renewed a company certificate that has no obvious owner inside the business.
The leak checks are a product, and almost nobody sells them
Here is the commercial argument that separates this page from every other accreditation page on this site.
Most F-Gas work is sold as installation. A system goes in, the customer pays, and the relationship goes quiet until something breaks. The statutory leak-check regime is treated as a compliance chore — something you do when a customer remembers to ask.
But read the obligation again. Every system above 5 tonnes CO₂e must be leak-checked annually, by law, forever, and the duty sits with the operator of the equipment — your customer — who in the overwhelming majority of cases does not know it exists.
That is a recurring, legally mandated, non-discretionary service, attached to every qualifying system you have ever installed, that you are already certified to perform and nobody else is chasing. It is the closest thing to an annuity in the refrigeration trade, and the reason firms do not have it is not that customers refuse — it is that nobody has a list of which systems they installed, what the charge was, and when the check is due.
Which makes this a records problem wearing a marketing problem’s clothes. Build the list and the revenue is already yours.
The mistakes we see most
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Qualifying the engineers and forgetting the company.
Individual tickets never expire; the company registration expires every year, and nobody owns it.
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Taking the category below the work.
Cat II does not cover a large system, and finding out on site is expensive.
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Treating leak checks as a chore.
It is a statutory, recurring service on equipment you installed.
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No refrigerant log.
It is the first thing asked for and the last thing anybody keeps.
What enforcement actually looks like
Most trades never meet their regulator, so it is worth being specific about what F-Gas enforcement is, because it changes what you keep.
It is environmental regulation, enforced in England by the Environment Agency, and the thing being protected is refrigerant not reaching the atmosphere. That shapes everything about how a check runs. Nobody is assessing whether your pipework is tidy. They are asking where the gas went.
Which means the artefact that matters is the log. Refrigerant type, quantity in, quantity out, recovered amounts, leak-check dates, per system. If the numbers reconcile, a check is short. If they do not — if a cylinder was signed out and no system shows it going in — the conversation becomes a long one, and the honest explanation that it was recorded on a job sheet that has since been lost is not an answer that helps.
The second artefact is the recovery equipment, and specifically that it is calibrated and certified rather than merely present. A recovery machine of uncertain provenance in the back of a van is a common finding and a bad one, because it goes directly to whether recovery is actually happening.
None of this is difficult. It is only difficult retrospectively, which is the whole point: the firms that find F-Gas compliance painful are the ones reconstructing it, and the firms that find it trivial are the ones where the log is filled in at the system, on the day, by the engineer who was there.
Where this lands in Gaffer
Company registration renewal is tracked as a business-level date rather than a personal one, which matters here more than anywhere else on this site — engineer qualifications do not expire and the company one does, so it is the date with no natural owner.
Every system is recorded against the site with its refrigerant type and charge, so the leak-check schedule is derived rather than remembered, and the annual round is a report instead of an archaeology project.
Questions AC and refrigeration engineers ask
Do I need both certificates as a sole trader? Yes. You are both the engineer and the company.
Which category should I take? The one covering the largest system you intend to work on. Upgrading later means sitting the assessment again.
Do the engineer qualifications expire? No. The company registration does, annually, and that is the one that lapses.
Who is responsible for leak checks — me or the customer? The operator of the equipment is legally responsible. In practice they do not know that, which is why it is a service worth selling.
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