The Boiler Upgrade Scheme, and whether you qualify

The Boiler Upgrade Scheme is a government grant in England and Wales that pays part of the cost of replacing a fossil fuel heating system with a heat pump. It is administered by Ofgem, and it has been running since 2022.

You do not claim the money back afterwards. The installer applies for the grant on your behalf, and it comes off the price before you pay anything, appearing on your quotation and your invoice as a deduction. Because the application is theirs, your eligibility and the installer's are assessed together, and the grant exists only through installers certified to do the work.

How much it is worth

There is one grant per property, and the amount depends on what is being fitted.

Houses off the gas grid can currently get more. A property heated by oil or LPG with no mains gas connection can have an extra £1,500 towards an air source or ground source heat pump, which takes the grant to £9,000. That uplift was announced in April 2026, started in July, and runs until 31 March 2027. The uplift has a closing date on it, so it is worth knowing about if you are on oil or LPG and weighing this up now.

Whether you qualify

Two conditions do most of the work.

You own the property. That is meant broadly. A second home counts, and so does a property you let out or a building you use for your business, as long as the person applying is the owner.

You are replacing a fossil fuel heating system. The scheme's own wording lists oil, gas, electric and LPG together, so a house on straight electric heating qualifies even though electricity is not a fossil fuel.

If both of those are true and the property is in England or Wales, you are probably eligible, and the list of things that rule a property out is short.

What rules a property out

• Being in Scotland or Northern Ireland. This scheme is England and Wales. Scotland has its own grant and interest-free loan; support in Northern Ireland is narrower and income based.
• Social housing, as defined in the housing legislation.
• A new build still with the developer. A finished house handed over with a fossil fuel boiler in it can qualify, but one the builder has not completed cannot.
• Replacing a low carbon system. The grant is for getting off fossil fuel, so swapping a tired heat pump for a new one is not eligible.
• Hybrid systems. A heat pump fitted alongside a gas boiler, the two sharing the heating between them, gets nothing.
• Other public money for the same work. A property already receiving government funding towards the same installation cannot take this as well.

Self-builds have their own route in and are eligible, whether you built the house yourself or paid a builder to do it, as long as it has never been owned by a company. Biomass boilers are the exception to that, and to a good deal else: no self-builds, and only rural properties that are off the gas grid.

What changed in April 2026

Anyone who looked at this scheme a year ago and concluded they did not qualify should look again. The regulations were amended on 28 April 2026 and the changes went almost entirely one way.

The Energy Performance Certificate requirement has gone. Until then you needed a valid EPC, and for most of the scheme's life it also had to be free of outstanding recommendations for loft or cavity wall insulation. That second condition sent a lot of older houses away to do insulation work first, or stopped them entirely. Neither applies now. Where a property has no EPC at all, the application uses other evidence, usually a recent bill and photographs of the existing heating.

Air-to-air heat pumps became eligible for the first time, at £2,500 and in homes only. These are the ones that blow warm air into a room, with no cylinder and no radiators, so they heat the house but leave hot water to whatever was doing it before, which is why the grant for them is lower.

The scheme was extended to 2030. It had been due to end sooner, and the 2026 budget for it is the largest since it started.

Certification of the installer also moved from being a condition of the scheme into the regulations themselves, which is a change to how the requirement is enforced.

The grant runs through the installer

You cannot apply yourself. The installer applies to Ofgem, and to be able to do that they must hold the certification the scheme requires for the technology they are fitting, and belong to an approved consumer code. A company that cannot produce both cannot get you the grant, whatever else is true about your house or their work. The guide on what certification covers sets out what that certification is evidence of.

Your part is confirming the property details and agreeing the quotation. Ofgem may contact you to check the installer had your authority to apply, and the certification body may want to inspect the finished installation. The deduction should be on the quotation from the outset, so you can see what is being claimed before you commit to anything.

There is also a clock. The installation has to be commissioned within 120 days of the application being made. That is more the installer's problem than yours, but it is useful to know about on a job that keeps slipping.

Conditions on the equipment

The heat pump has to appear on Ofgem's product eligibility list, and it has to reach a seasonal coefficient of performance of at least 2.8. That is a floor on efficiency, and it is a low one: current machines generally clear it with room to spare, so it excludes poor products without saying anything about whether a particular system will run well in a particular house.

There are capacity limits too — 45 kW of heat output for a single system, 70 kW where several heat pumps are combined, and 300 kW for a shared ground loop. A house is typically looking at something between 4 and 12 kW, so these matter to a small commercial building and to almost no domestic installation.

What the grant does not do

The grant reduces what you pay to have the system put in. It has no bearing on what the system then costs you to run. The running cost comparison here deals with the second question and leaves the grant out of it altogether.

The dropping of the insulation condition is worth reading carefully, because the change was to the paperwork. A draughty house still needs hotter water to keep warm, hotter water is still what makes a heat pump expensive to run, and the old rule was a blunt way of pointing at that. The survey is now what tells you, which puts more weight on getting a proper one.

Finally, the numbers move. The grant was £5,000 at launch in 2022, £7,500 from late 2023, and £9,000 for some households since July 2026. Everything above is what applies in September 2026. The rules that govern an application are the ones in force on the day it is properly made, so the current Ofgem guidance is the authority for any of this, and it is worth a look before you rely on a figure.