Boiler Upgrade Scheme Grant Calculator UK

How the Boiler Upgrade Scheme works in 2026

• £7,500 off an air-source or ground-source heat pump; £5,000 off a biomass boiler (rural, off-gas only).
• Your MCS-certified installer applies on your behalf — you never handle the money.
• The grant is deducted from the installer's invoice, usually within ~30 days of application.
• Scheme is funded until the end of 2028.
• You need a valid EPC with no outstanding loft / cavity-wall recommendations (or an exemption).
• Available in England and Wales only. Scotland: Home Energy Scotland. Northern Ireland: see NI Direct.

How this calculator works

The Boiler Upgrade Scheme (BUS) eligibility calculator is a decision tree, not a cash-flow model. It walks through the six conditions that determine whether a UK household qualifies for the £7,500 grant on an air-source or ground-source heat pump, or the £5,000 grant on a biomass boiler: country, tenure, property age, the heating system you are replacing, whether you have a valid EPC with insulation recommendations cleared, and the technology you are fitting. If every condition passes, you are eligible; if any fails, we tell you why. We then subtract the grant from your quoted install price to show your net out-of-pocket cost.

The grant itself is paid to your MCS-certified installer, not to you. In practice the installer quotes you the full install price, you sign, they apply to Ofgem, and the grant is deducted from the invoice before you pay. Funds are typically disbursed to the installer within about 30 days of application. The scheme is funded through to the end of 2028 under the current HM Treasury settlement, with annual budget uplifts announced in Spring 2024 and Autumn 2025 — so unlike the earlier Green Homes Grant, running out of money mid-year is not currently a realistic risk.

Common pitfalls and things people get wrong

• EPC insulation recommendations. The single most common disqualifier. If your EPC lists "loft insulation" or "cavity-wall insulation" under recommendations, you must either install them (or have them) before the BUS application, or get a formal exemption from the EPC assessor. Many applicants discover this the hard way when their installer's BUS submission is rejected.
• New-builds are excluded. If your property was first occupied in the last 12 months, you don't qualify — the assumption being that new-builds should have a heat pump designed in from scratch. Some self-builds on heating-tech exemption can qualify; check with your installer.
• Social housing is excluded. BUS is for owner-occupiers, private landlords and small non-domestic businesses. If your landlord is a council or housing association, they fund heat pumps through the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund instead; tenants don't apply under BUS.
• Biomass has a rural/off-gas restriction. The £5,000 biomass-boiler grant is only available in rural areas without access to the mains gas grid. If you are on gas, biomass is not a BUS route — only heat pumps are.
• The grant cannot be stacked with ECO4 on the same system. You can have insulation funded by ECO4 and then apply for a BUS grant on the heat pump afterwards, but you cannot double-dip on the heat pump itself. Similarly, VAT zero-rating applies on top of the BUS grant — they are stackable.

UK-specific context

BUS is an England-and-Wales scheme run by Ofgem. If you are in Scotland, your equivalent is Home Energy Scotland (HES), which offers a different structure — a grant of up to £7,500 for a heat pump with an additional £7,500 interest-free loan to spread the rest, plus rural and off-gas uplifts. HES is generally more generous than BUS for lower-income or off-gas households. In Northern Ireland there is no direct equivalent currently live; schemes change, so check NI Direct before quoting.

Landlords can apply under BUS for properties they rent out privately, and there is no portfolio cap — a landlord with 20 rented flats can in principle get 20 grants, one per property, subject to each passing the eligibility tests and to annual funding availability. This is a meaningful lever for landlords ahead of the proposed Minimum Energy Efficiency Standard uplift to EPC C by 2028 for new tenancies (and 2030 for existing); a heat pump plus the insulation BUS requires can lift a property's EPC materially.

When this isn't the right answer

This calculator tells you whether you qualify and what your net install cost is — it does not tell you whether a heat pump is the right choice for your home. For that, use our Heat Pump vs Gas Boiler calculator, which models running cost and 15-year total cost of ownership. If you are in Scotland, this calculator will correctly flag that BUS does not apply to you, but you will want to model the HES loan-plus-grant structure separately — we don't yet include it. And if you are a small commercial or non-domestic user, BUS does cover you, but the sizing and commercial-tariff maths are outside the scope of a home-focused tool.

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