If you have looked into a heat pump in the last couple of years, you will probably have been told some version of this: sort your loft and cavity wall insulation first, and get a valid energy certificate, or you cannot have the £7,500 grant.

Neither of those is true any more. Both rules were scrapped on 8 May 2024 and neither has been replaced. They are still repeated by installers, comparison sites and well-meaning advice pages, and they stop people applying who would get the money.

Below is the exact citation, so you can settle the argument with anyone who tells you otherwise. (The grant's official name is the Boiler Upgrade Scheme, and it runs in England and Wales.)

What was scrapped, and by what

The scheme runs on the Boiler Upgrade Scheme (England and Wales) Regulations 2022, SI 2022/565. Two things in it created the requirement people still cite:

  • Regulation 6, headed "Insulation requirements".
  • Regulation 5(1)(c)(i), the limb carrying the valid-EPC condition.

Both were taken out by the Boiler Upgrade Scheme (England and Wales) (Amendment) Regulations 2024, SI 2024/524, in force 8 May 2024. Regulation 6 of that amending instrument omits regulation 6 of the 2022 Regulations outright. Nothing was put in their place.

You can check this yourself without taking our word for it: open the 2022 Regulations on legislation.gov.uk and look at the "Changes to legislation" tab. Regulation 6 is shown as omitted.

What the people who run the scheme say now

Ofgem administers the scheme, and its guidance for property owners now frames insulation as advice rather than as a condition: a heat pump "performs best in a well-insulated home", and government "recommends that you consider making energy efficiency upgrades where practical and affordable".

Recommends. Not requires. There is no insulation condition to satisfy and no insulation evidence to produce.

Two things that survive, and are easily mistaken for the old rule

This is where the confusion is genuinely understandable, because insulation has not become irrelevant — it has stopped being an eligibility question and stayed a money question.

An EPC can still be reported on the application. It is a data field, not a gate. An expired or absent certificate is not a reason for refusal.

The heat pump must still be sized to meet the property's full space heating demand on its own. That requirement is real and unchanged. A poorly insulated house needs more heat, so it needs a bigger heat pump, so the quote is higher. Insulation still changes what you pay. It no longer changes whether you qualify.

If an installer tells you that you need insulation work before you can get the grant, the accurate version of that conversation is: "insulating first would let me fit a smaller, cheaper heat pump." That may well be good advice. It is not a condition of the scheme.

What the real conditions are

Briefly, and with the caveat that only Ofgem can decide an application:

  • You own the property, and it is in England or Wales.
  • You are replacing fossil fuel or electric heating. Electric counts, and is routinely listed as though it were an afterthought.
  • Whoever fits it holds the certification the scheme insists on — and since 28 April 2026 there is only one that counts, the Microgeneration Certification Scheme, or MCS. The alternative route was removed that day. Both the installer and the heat pump itself have to be covered by it.
  • Your installer applies, not you. There is no householder application route.
  • One grant per property.

Our heat pump guidance page sets all of this out with the regulation references, including what disqualifies you and the three separate deadlines that catch people out.

The grant figures, and why they carry a date

As at 29 August 2026: £7,500 for an air-to-water or ground source heat pump, £2,500 for air-to-air, £5,000 for a biomass boiler, and £9,000 where the property is off the gas grid and heated by oil or LPG — that last one available from 21 July 2026 to 31 March 2027.

Every one of those figures carries a date because none of them is set in the regulations. Regulation 13 of the 2022 Regulations leaves the amounts to the Secretary of State, who may review them at any time, with a change taking effect 28 days after the notice is published. That is the entire warning period. They have already moved twice this year. A page that prints "£7,500" with no date attached is printing something with an undisclosed shelf life.

Check the current values with Ofgem before you rely on them.

Why we are writing this and not selling you anything

We do not list heat pump products and we do not list heat pump installers.

The list that would let us — the register of MCS-certified firms and products — is not published under terms that let anyone copy it. We have written to ask. Until they answer we would rather have no directory at all than one built on data we took without permission, or one padded out with a proxy that only looks like the real thing. Check MCS's own search before you sign anything.

What is entirely public, entirely checkable, and demonstrably being got wrong is the rules. So that is what we publish.

Nothing here is legal advice or a determination of your eligibility. Only Ofgem can decide an application. Facts checked 29 August 2026 against the legislation, Ofgem and gov.uk.

Sources

Related reading: the heat pump grant, and the rules that decide whether you get it.