The £9,000 Heat Pump Grant for Oil and LPG Homes: Who Gets It, and Whether the Sums Work

Heating season is the point at which most people start thinking about this, and it's also the point at which installers get busy. But almost every page you'll find explaining the grant belongs to a company that wants to sell you the heat pump. So here's the version without the sales pitch: who qualifies, how the money actually reaches you, what it costs to run once it's in, and the honest case for leaving your oil boiler exactly where it is.

What the grant is worth

The Boiler Upgrade Scheme has been running since 2022. It's administered by Ofgem, funded by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, and open in England and Wales only.

The £9,000 rate is the temporary one. It applies from 21 July 2026 until 31 March 2027, and only to air-to-water or ground source heat pumps. Air-to-air units and biomass boilers don't get the uplift; an air-to-air heat pump is still £2,500 whatever you're replacing.

Everything else about the scheme is unchanged. Same application route, same rules, same 120-day clock.

Who actually qualifies

Two tests. You have to pass both.

The property test. To count as off-gas-grid for the uplift, your property must not be fuelled by mains gas, and the heating system you're replacing must run on oil, LPG or coal. If there's a mains gas connection, you're on £7,500. That's the whole point of the uplift, and it's why the sales pages pushing "£9,000 heat pump grant" at everyone are being loose with it.

The ownership test. You need to own the property. That includes a business, a second home, or a home you rent out to tenants. Landlords are in, which surprises a lot of people. Only the owner can apply, not the tenant.

You're still eligible if you've already had government help insulating the place. Insulation grants don't disqualify you.

Biomass has an extra hurdle: off gas grid and a rural location and an emissions certificate. Worth knowing if you were considering it as the alternative.

How the money actually reaches you

This trips people up more than anything else in the scheme, so it's worth being precise.

You don't apply. Your installer does. The Boiler Upgrade Scheme is installer-led. An MCS certified installer applies to Ofgem for a voucher on your behalf, and redeems it after the job. There is no homeowner application form.

It's a discount, not a rebate. You never receive £9,000. The installer has to pass the full grant value on as an upfront discount. It must appear on the quote before installation and on the invoice afterwards, and they're not allowed to ask you for that money. So a £13,000 installation becomes a £4,000 bill. Nothing to claim back, nothing to wait for.

Which makes the quote stage the place to check it. If the grant isn't itemised on the quote, ask why before you sign anything.

You've got 120 days. Your installer must commission and install the heat pump within 120 days of applying for the grant, or it stops being eligible. That's a real deadline, not a formality, and lead times stretch as winter approaches, so ask how the job fits inside the window before you commit.

Find the installer through MCS. Certification is a condition of the scheme, so the MCS "find an installer" directory is the sensible starting point. Get three quotes. Prices for the same job vary more than they should.

Does the maths actually work?

Here's where the sales pages get optimistic. The honest answer: better than it was in the summer, and better than for a gas home, but not the slam dunk you'll see claimed.

The upfront cost. A whole-house air source heat pump install for a typical three-bed sits somewhere around £10,000 to £13,000 after a proper survey, before any grant. Bigger or more awkward properties go higher, and older off-grid houses tend to be exactly that. Take £9,000 off and you're looking at roughly £1,000 to £4,000 net for a straightforward job, and considerably more if the survey says you need new radiators, a hot water cylinder or pipework upgrades, which in an old oil-heated house it often will.

The running cost. This is the bit worth doing carefully, and the numbers have moved since the summer.

Kerosene bottomed out in July and has climbed since. PriceTank's September 2026 market report puts the national average for a 1,000-litre order at around 88p to 89p per litre excluding VAT in mid-September, up from an August average of 85.5p and a July average of 82.4p. Delivered prices vary a lot by region and supplier, though: one North West distributor was quoting from 97p excluding VAT on 10 September. To keep the sums honest and simple, the worked example below uses a round £1.00 a litre including VAT, which sits inside that spread. Your last delivery note is better evidence than any price site; if you paid the national average of about 93p with VAT, knock roughly £260 a year off every heat pump saving below.

Kerosene delivers about 10.35 kWh per litre, so at £1.00 you're paying 9.7p per kWh of fuel. A modern condensing oil boiler running at around 90% efficiency turns that into roughly 10.7p per kWh of actual heat. If your boiler is older and running nearer 75%, it's closer to 13p.

Now the heat pump. Under the October 2026 price cap, electricity is 26.32p per kWh with no VAT on it: the 5% came off domestic electricity on 1 October and stays off until 31 March 2027. A well-installed air source heat pump in the UK typically achieves a seasonal efficiency (SCOP) between about 2.8 and 3.5, so every unit of electricity buys you roughly three units of heat. That works out at 7.5p to 9.4p per kWh of heat.

Put those side by side on a house burning 4,000 litres a year, which is about £4,000 of oil delivering somewhere near 37,000 kWh of heat:

So on standard cap rates, against a modern oil boiler, you're saving somewhere between £700 and £1,200 a year at £1 a litre, or £450 to £950 if your oil is nearer 93p. Real money, but it depends heavily on what you pay for oil, and on its own it doesn't pay back the install cost quickly.

Two things move that in the heat pump's favour:

And one thing that moves against it: oil is still historically cheap. Even at £1 a litre, a condensing oil boiler is an economical way to heat a house. That's an uncomfortable fact for the sales pitch, but it's the one your own bills will reflect.

The honest case for doing nothing

A few reasons to leave it alone, which you won't find on an installer's website.

Your boiler is fine. If you've got a modern condensing oil boiler with years left in it, replacing working kit is rarely the best use of £4,000. A proper annual service costs £95 to £145 for an oil system and keeps the efficiency where it should be, which, as the numbers above show, is most of the argument.

Your house isn't ready. Heat pumps work by running water at a lower temperature than a boiler, over longer periods. In a draughty, under-insulated house with small radiators, that either doesn't keep up or costs a fortune. Insulation first is not a stalling tactic, it's the correct order.

The survey says the net cost is £8,000, not £2,000. Perfectly common in older rural properties. At that point the payback stretches past fifteen years and the decision changes.

Where the money's coming from. £4,000 of savings from a service, a tariff fix, and sorting your insulation is £4,000 that isn't borrowed. Worth doing regardless of what you decide about the heat pump.

If you're in Scotland or Northern Ireland

The Boiler Upgrade Scheme and its £9,000 uplift are England and Wales only.

Scotland runs its own scheme through Home Energy Scotland: a grant of up to £7,500, with an additional £1,500 rural uplift for remote rural, island and off-gas rural areas, taking the maximum to £9,000, plus an optional interest-free loan for the remainder. One important difference: it has to be your only or main home, so unlike the English and Welsh scheme, landlords and second homes are out.

Northern Ireland has no direct equivalent.

What to do this autumn

Grant deadlines, tariff end dates, service intervals: the sort of thing that's easy to mean to sort out and never quite get to. That's what The Home Concierge is built to keep track of, alongside the other renewals that creep up through the year.