The heat pump grant, and the rules that decide whether you get it.
The Boiler Upgrade Scheme is the decisive fact for most heat pump buyers in England and Wales, and eligibility is a hard, checkable thing that is widely misreported. This page is what the legislation, Ofgem and gov.uk actually say — nothing else. Checked 29 August 2026.
This is a guidance page, not a comparison. We do not list heat pump products and we do not list heat pump installers, because the register that governs them — MCS — is not published under a licence that lets anyone republish it. We have written to MCS to ask for access to the certified installer dataset, and to TrustMark for theirs. Until they answer, we would rather have no directory than one built on data we took without permission, or one padded out with a proxy that only looks like the real thing.
What the grant pays
One grant per property, taken off your quote as an up-front discount rather than paid to you afterwards. These are the values published as at 29 August 2026.
| Technology | Grant | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Air-to-water heat pump | £7,500 | What most people mean by “air source”. Heat delivered to the property through water. |
| Ground source heat pump | £7,500 | Includes water source heat pumps and pumps on shared ground loops. |
| Air-to-air heat pump | £2,500 | New to the scheme on 28 April 2026. Heat delivered through air. Not eligible at all in a non-residential building. |
| Biomass boiler | £5,000 | Rural, off-gas-grid properties only, with an emissions certificate. Not a heat pump. |
| Off gas grid, oil or LPG heated | £9,000 | Air-to-water or ground source, where the property is heated by oil or LPG and has no mains gas connection. Available 21 July 2026 to 31 March 2027. |
Why every figure here carries a date. None of these amounts is set in the regulations. Regulation 13 of the Boiler Upgrade Scheme (England and Wales) Regulations 2022 says the Secretary of State determines and publishes them, and may review them at any time — up, down or unchanged. A change takes effect 28 days after the notice is published. That is the entire warning period, so a site that prints “£7,500” with no date is printing something with an undisclosed shelf life.
And they have moved twice this year. Air-to-air heat pumps were brought into the scheme on 28 April 2026 at £2,500. The off-gas-grid uplift to £9,000 began on 21 July 2026 and is stated to run to 31 March 2027.
Ofgem and gov.uk describe the off-gas-grid money differently — Ofgem states a flat £9,000, gov.uk states £7,500 plus “an additional £1,500”. They are the same money. Only Ofgem gives the start date, so we follow Ofgem, which administers the scheme.
The EPC and insulation requirements no longer exist
This is the single most misreported thing about the scheme, and it is worth stating plainly because it stops people applying who would qualify.
There is no EPC requirement, and no loft-or-cavity-insulation requirement, for a Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant.
Regulation 6 of the 2022 Regulations was headed “Insulation requirements”. It was omitted on 8 May 2024. The limb of regulation 5 that carried the valid-EPC condition was removed by the same instrument, the Boiler Upgrade Scheme (England and Wales) (Amendment) Regulations 2024. Neither has been replaced.
Ofgem now frames insulation purely as advice: 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.
Two things survive that are easy to mistake for a surviving requirement. An EPC can still be reported on the application — it is simply not a condition of eligibility. And the heat pump must still be sized to meet the property’s full space heating demand on its own, so a poorly insulated house needs a bigger, dearer heat pump. Insulation still changes the quote. It no longer changes whether you qualify.
Who qualifies
- You own the propertyA business premises, a second home and a property you let to tenants all count. If you do not occupy it, you must tell the tenant what the installation involves.
- It is in England or WalesScotland has Home Energy Scotland loans and grants instead. Northern Ireland’s Boiler Replacement Scheme is closed.
- You are replacing fossil fuel or electric heatingOil, gas, LPG — and electric heating counts too. The regulations treat an electric heating system as its own qualifying route, though a heat pump is expressly excluded from that definition. Government pages tend to list “electric” inside a bracket labelled “fossil fuel”, which reads as though it were an afterthought. It is not.
- A qualifying self-buildNew builds are generally out, but a self-build qualifies if it was built principally with the labour or resources of the first owner, has never been owned even partly by anything other than an individual, and is not part of a multi-building development on a plot bought from whoever set the plans.
What disqualifies you
- You are replacing a low-carbon systemThe scheme replaces fossil fuel or electric heating. It does not pay to upgrade a heat pump you already have.
- A hybrid systemA fossil fuel boiler working alongside a heat pump is not eligible plant. The heat pump has to be sized to meet the property’s full space heating demand on its own, even where a supplementary appliance is fitted.
- Social housingIncluding shared-ownership and other arrangements let below market value to people who could not otherwise afford them.
- Most new buildsA property the developer is still building is out. A finished new build you have moved into, still running a fossil fuel boiler, can qualify.
- A grant has already been paid at that addressOne grant per property. That includes a previous grant from public funds for a heat pump or biomass boiler at the same address, and a heat pump or biomass boiler already installed there as an Energy Company Obligation measure.
- Air-to-air in a non-residential buildingA specific exclusion added with air-to-air itself in April 2026. Air-to-water and ground source are not restricted this way.
The equipment has its own bar, which your installer is responsible for meeting: capacity no more than 45 kW thermal (70 kW combined with other heat pumps, 300 kW for a shared ground loop); a seasonal coefficient of performance of at least 2.8 for air-to-water and ground source; an electrically driven compressor; heat-generating parts that have not been used before; and enough capacity to meet the full space heating and hot water demand of the property.
MCS certification is the requirement — and it is now the only route
This is the part that connects heat pumps to the rest of this site. Every other category here has a register we can show you. This one has a register that decides whether public money changes hands, and we cannot show it to you yet.
Schedule 4 of the 2022 Regulations says the installation must be certified under the Microgeneration Certification Scheme, installed in accordance with a relevant MCS installation standard. Ofgem puts it in plain terms: for a heating system to be eligible, it has to be installed and commissioned by an MCS certified installer, and MCS certification means both that the installer is technically competent and that the products they use meet the correct standards.
So both halves are MCS. The installer must hold MCS certification, and the product must be MCS certified. Neither is optional.
And the alternative is gone. Until 28 April 2026, Schedule 4 had a second limb allowing an equivalent approved scheme to satisfy the requirement. That limb was omitted by the 2026 Amendment Regulations. As of that date, MCS is the sole certification route to a Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant.
MCS certification is per technology, and this catches people out. A firm certified for solar PV is not thereby certified for heat pumps, and a firm certified for air-to-water is not automatically certified for ground source. The certificate that matters to your grant is the one covering the technology you are actually having fitted. Ask which technologies the certificate covers, and check it on MCS’s own register before you sign anything.
How the grant is claimed — your installer applies, not you
Checked specifically, because most people assume it works the other way round. The regulations say “an installer may make an application”. There is no route for a householder to apply. Ofgem calls the scheme installer-led.
- Get quotes from MCS certified installers. Ofgem’s own guidance is to obtain more than one, as with any home improvement.
- Agree a quote with the grant already deducted. Deducting the grant from the total quoted is a condition of the application, so a quote that does not show it is not a compliant Boiler Upgrade Scheme quote. The money never passes through your hands.
- The installer applies to Ofgem on your behalf.
- Ofgem contacts you to confirm consent and eligibility. If they do not get that confirmation within 14 calendar days they may reject the application. Confirming consent is not committing to that installer — it only confirms the application is being made in good faith. Where two installers have applied for the same property, you may confirm consent to one, and the rest are rejected.
- The work is completed and commissioned. Ofgem allows three months from approval, or six months for ground source. Miss it and the installer has to apply again and you have to consent again.
- Ofgem pays the installer. Ofgem may audit at any point, including after payment, and may visit the property. MCS may carry out its own checks.
Watch the deadlines, because they are three different clocks. Ofgem gives three months from approval to complete the installation, six for ground source. Separately, the system must not have been commissioned more than 120 days before the application is properly made. gov.uk renders that second rule as “within 120 days of applying”, which is not the same statement. Where they differ we follow Ofgem, which runs the scheme.
What it does not cover
The grant is a fixed contribution towards one heat pump or biomass boiler. It is not a percentage of the project, and it does not stretch.
- The rest of the job. Radiators, hot water cylinder, pipework, controls and any insulation work are part of your quote, not part of the grant. The grant is simply subtracted from the total.
- Scotland and Northern Ireland. England and Wales only.
- A second installation at the same property.
- Hybrids, and replacing an existing low-carbon system.
- Running costs, or any guarantee about them. The scheme pays towards installation and says nothing about your bills afterwards.
- The 0% VAT relief is a separate thing. Ofgem notes 0% VAT on the installation of energy-saving materials, including heat pumps and biomass boilers, from 1 April 2022 to 31 March 2027. It is not part of the Boiler Upgrade Scheme and nobody applies for it — it should already be reflected in the quote.
Why there is no heat pump comparison here
Everywhere else on this site, the method is the same: mirror the official register, publish it usefully, and show what vendors claim beside what the register records. Heat pumps break that method in a specific way, and it is worth being exact about how.
There is no ENA register entry to show you. The Energy Networks Association type test register covers equipment that generates or stores alongside the grid. A heat pump is load — it consumes electricity, it does not export any — so it appears on none of the fourteen device types on that register. Its absence from it means nothing at all about the equipment.
The register that does govern heat pumps is MCS, and it is not ours to republish. MCS’s terms prohibit copying, storing or commercial use of their content without written permission. Their public search is also missing the one fact a buyer most needs: it shows that a company is listed, but not whether the certificate is current. TrustMark’s data is richer and its terms are stricter still — copyright and database rights asserted, written permission required.
So we have asked, in writing, for both. MCS’s own data-request process offers an installer dataset that explicitly includes certification dates, which is precisely what would let us say “certificate NAP-11766, active, checked on this date” instead of “we found them on a list”. That is the only version of an installer directory worth publishing.
What we will not do in the meantime. We will not scrape either register. We will not build a directory out of Companies House activity codes and imply it means something it does not — “registered as a heating contractor” and “MCS certified for heat pumps” are different facts, and a household about to spend twelve thousand pounds deserves the second one or neither. And whatever we eventually publish, we will report what the schemes record and the date we checked it. We will not describe anyone as vetted, approved or recommended. We report on schemes; we do not operate one.
Where this comes from
Primary sources only. No comparison sites, no installer marketing, nothing behind a licence we do not hold.
- The Boiler Upgrade Scheme (England and Wales) Regulations 2022 — SI 2022/565, as amended in 2024 and 2026. Eligibility, plant requirements, certification, and the fact that the Secretary of State sets the grant values rather than the regulations.
- Ofgem — Boiler Upgrade Scheme guidance for property owners — the administering body. Current grant values, consent, deadlines, audit.
- gov.uk — Apply for the Boiler Upgrade Scheme
- MCS — find a certified installer — the register itself. Search it directly; we do not hold a copy.
Nothing on this page is legal advice or a determination of your eligibility. Only Ofgem can decide an application. Facts checked 29 August 2026; grant values can change on 28 days’ notice, so if you are reading this long afterwards, check Ofgem.
What we have written about heat pumps
The rules are what is public and checkable here, so the rules are what we write about. Each piece carries its legislative citation and the date it was checked.