The Boiler Upgrade Scheme is the government grant that takes a large chunk off the cost of putting an air source heat pump into your home. It is the main reason heat pumps have gone from a curiosity to something ordinary Teesside households genuinely consider. It is also badly explained almost everywhere, so here is the plain version: what it is, what it is not, and how it actually reaches you.
In this guide
What the scheme actually is
The Boiler Upgrade Scheme is a government grant available to eligible homeowners in England and Wales. It offers a grant of £7,500 towards installing an air source heat pump. It is not a loan, and it is not something you claim back at the end of the year. It comes off the job.
The thinking behind it is simple. A heat pump costs more to install than a replacement boiler, and that gap is what stops most people. The grant exists to close some of it.
One point before anything else. This article covers England and Wales. Scotland and Northern Ireland run their own separate arrangements, and they are not the same. If your property is not in England or Wales, look at your own nation’s scheme instead.
What it pays towards
The grant goes towards the installation of an air source heat pump. That is the technology almost every Teesside home ends up with, because it takes heat out of the outside air and puts it into your radiators, your underfloor heating and your hot water cylinder.
What it does not cover is worth being just as clear about. Air conditioning is not covered. There is no grant of any kind for cooling a bedroom, and anyone who tells you otherwise has either misunderstood the scheme or is hoping you will not check. Our guide on choosing between air conditioning and a heat pump goes through the rest of the differences.
- It is a fixed contribution, not a percentage. It does not scale with the size or the price of your job.
- It is a contribution, not the whole cost. A substantial one, but you are still paying for part of the installation.
- It applies to the installation as a whole, not to the box outside on its own.
- It does not cover insulation work, even where that work would help your heat pump.
Who it is aimed at
Broadly, it is aimed at homeowners in England and Wales replacing an existing fossil fuel heating system, meaning gas, oil, LPG or direct electric, with a heat pump. It is a replacement scheme, and that framing tells you most of what you need to know about who it suits.
The households it fits best are the obvious ones. If your boiler is ageing and you were going to spend money on your heating anyway, the grant lands exactly when the decision is live. If you are on oil or LPG out towards Guisborough or past Saltburn, you are already paying for the most expensive fuel available, which makes the case stronger still.
The insulation and EPC question
A property generally needs a valid Energy Performance Certificate to qualify, and there are conditions around any outstanding insulation recommendations on it. In plain terms, the scheme does not want to pay for a heat pump in a house that is throwing heat out through the loft.
We deliberately will not spell out the exact rule here, because it is the sort of detail that gets adjusted, and we do not want you deciding on a paragraph we wrote a year ago. We check your EPC at survey and tell you plainly where you stand.
Here is the part worth hearing anyway. Even where insulation is not blocking your eligibility, it is usually the thing we would tell you to do first. A heat pump in a well insulated house is a good decision. A heat pump in a leaky house is an expensive way to keep heating the sky. The scheme is nudging you somewhere we would nudge you regardless.
Your installer applies, not you
This is the most misunderstood part of the scheme, and the part that stops people needlessly. You do not fill in a form. You do not sit in a queue on a government website. The installer applies for the grant on your behalf. That is how it is designed to work.
The reason is that the grant is tied to the quality of the installation, not just to the household. Installations generally have to be MCS certified to qualify, which means the company doing the work has to be certified and has to register the installation properly. Since the certified installer stands behind the job, the scheme puts the application in their hands too. Our guide on MCS certification covers what that involves.
So your first job is not paperwork. It is choosing an installer who is certified and who you trust. Everything else follows from that.
How it works in practice
From your side of the table, a grant funded installation with us runs roughly like this.
- We survey your home. Not a phone estimate, an actual visit, with a proper heat loss survey behind it.
- We tell you honestly whether a heat pump is right for your property, and whether anything needs doing first.
- We confirm your eligibility against the current rules rather than last year’s.
- You get a written quote showing the grant applied, so you see the number you would actually pay.
- We handle the application and the paperwork.
- The work happens, the installation is registered, and the grant is settled through us rather than through you.
The thing to take from that is that the grant does not arrive as a cheque. It is reflected in what you pay. So when you compare quotes, make sure you are comparing the same thing.
Ask every quote the same question: is that the price before the grant or after it? Two honest companies can print very different numbers for the same job.
Why we will not print the rules here
You may have noticed this article keeps stopping short of listing exactly what qualifies. That is deliberate. Government schemes change. Conditions get adjusted, guidance gets clarified, and dates move. A page that confidently listed every criterion would be accurate the day it was written and quietly wrong afterwards, and nobody would notice until a homeowner had made a decision on it.
So here is our position. The shape of the scheme is what we have described: a grant, for eligible homeowners in England and Wales, towards an air source heat pump, applied for by a certified installer, with conditions around the property and its EPC. For the current detail, gov.uk is the authority. For whether your specific house in Norton or Marske or Eaglescliffe qualifies today, ask us and we will find out properly.
What the grant does not do
A grant is a strong argument. It is not the whole argument, and we would be doing you a disservice if we let it become one.
- It does not make a heat pump right for every home. A poorly insulated solid wall terrace is a harder job than a modern estate house in Ingleby Barwick, grant or no grant.
- It does not cool your bedroom. A heat pump is a heating system. If your problem is a loft conversion that is unbearable in July, this is the wrong product.
- It does not guarantee lower bills. That depends on what you are replacing, how your home holds heat, and the gap between gas and electricity prices.
- It does not pay for the preparation. Insulation, and radiator changes where they are needed, sit outside it.
- It does not make a bad installation good. The grant reduces the price. It does not size your system. Only a proper survey does that.
We fit both air conditioning and heat pumps, so we have no reason to steer you towards the one with a grant attached. If a heat pump is not right for your home, we will tell you, and we will tell you why.
Finding out where you stand
The honest answer to “do I qualify?” is that it depends on your property, and the only way to know is to look at it. That is a free visit, not a sales call, and it ends with a straight answer either way.
We are a family run business on North Ormsby Road in Middlesbrough, covering roughly twenty miles around it: Stockton on Tees, Thornaby, Billingham, Norton, Yarm, Eaglescliffe, Ingleby Barwick, Redcar, Marske, Saltburn, Guisborough, Marton, Hartlepool, Peterlee and Darlington.
Ring us on 01642 680 873 and we will book a survey. Nothing here is a guarantee of eligibility, and the current scheme rules are published on gov.uk.
