What does a heat pump actually cost?

The honest answer to "what does a heat pump cost" is two numbers. The price the installer puts on the quote, and the price you actually pay after the £7,500 government grant. Most homeowners search for the first one and discover the second is the one that matters.

Every MCS-certified air-source or ground-source install in England and Wales qualifies for the same £7,500 Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant. Scotland has its own equivalent of the same value. The grant is not means-tested, and the £7,500 is not a discount the installer offers. It is a baseline you should expect off any UK quote. So any two quotes worth comparing should be in net-of-grant terms.

This guide is what that picture looks like. What the install costs by property type. How the grant is actually paid (it isn't a cheque). What insulation grants stack on top of it. And how the picture changes in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. What the heat pump costs to run year on year is a separate question, covered in the running-costs guide.

Last reviewed May 2026. The figures and dates were correct then. The timeline chart in Stacking below shows what's still live, what's about to close, and what's coming.

What an air-source heat pump install costs depends mostly on property size. The MCS Data Dashboard published a 2025 mean of £13,387 across 9,288 ASHP installs in South East England, with a per-kilowatt figure of about £1,661/kW that holds within twelve per cent across regions. That £/kW number is the most useful single figure to carry around. Total cost is essentially the heat-pump kilowatt rating multiplied by £1,661, with a thousand or two of variation either way.

Heat-pump size tracks property size. A detached four-bed needs a bigger pump than a mid-terrace, and the gap between the two installs is mostly that. The bands below come from MCS data and the typical kilowatt range per archetype:

Two things to read into the bars. First, the £7,500 grant is large enough relative to gross install cost that it changes the picture substantially. For a typical semi, you are paying around £4,500 out of pocket once it's settled. Second, the spread within each property type is wide. These are mid bands, not point estimates. A 1930s semi with no cylinder needs a different install from a 1990s semi already plumbed for one. The HeatPass cost output personalises against your actual answers rather than the median.

A few costs aren't in the bands above. If your home runs on a combi boiler today, expect £1,500 to £4,500 on top for a hot-water cylinder and the pipework that goes with it. If a couple of radiators were borderline on gas, you'll see one or two get swapped in the install quote, usually £300 to £600 each. Solid-wall insulation, where it's needed, sits outside the heat-pump quote entirely and is often the prerequisite rather than an add-on. The HeatPass verdict names whichever of these apply.

Worth a sanity check on what you'd otherwise spend. The natural gas-boiler comparator is a £3,000 to £4,000 condensing combi swap, and most of the switch numbers above assume that. Homes still running a chimney-vented or floor-standing boiler from before condensing rules came in are a different starting point. Replacing one of those means a flue rebuild, a new gas run, sometimes a relocated unit, and the bill can easily reach £5,000 to £7,000 before a heat pump enters the comparison. In a house like that, the heat-pump install above isn't being weighed against £3,500. It's being weighed against a number much closer to its own.

The Boiler Upgrade Scheme is a government grant of £7,500 toward an air-source or ground-source heat pump install, run by Ofgem, available across England and Wales. It isn't means-tested. Whether you own a £200,000 flat or a £2 million detached, the grant is the same.

A homeowner doesn't apply for the grant directly, and that's the bit most search results explain badly. The MCS-certified installer applies on your behalf, and the £7,500 lands as a discount on your quote, not a cheque you receive afterwards. From your perspective, the install costs £7,500 less than the gross figure the installer would otherwise have charged. Ofgem pays the installer directly after the install completes.

The scheme is funded to 2030. The Boiler Upgrade Scheme (England and Wales) (Amendment) Regulations 2026 (SI 2026/390) extended the end date from the previous 2028 commitment and came into force on 28 April 2026. The 2025/26 budget was £295 million, the largest annual allocation to date.

The same regulations removed the Energy Performance Certificate requirement entirely. Until 28 April 2026, a home needed a valid EPC with no outstanding loft or cavity-wall recommendations, which was the main reason applications used to fall through. From that date the installer verifies the existing fuel type and heating system during the survey, and properties without a valid EPC can still apply. Insulation adequacy is assessed by the installer rather than read off the EPC.

Hybrid systems aren't eligible, and "hybrid" in the BUS rules means a specific thing, a heat pump paired with a fossil-fuel boiler. The grant is for fully electric heat pumps and biomass boilers only. Two electric systems together in the same home (an air-to-water unit feeding a cylinder plus air-to-air heads for cooling, say) is fine, it just doesn't get two grants. Air-to-air heat pumps on their own (the kind that look like air conditioners) qualify for a smaller £2,500 grant. A £2,500 heat-battery grant has been announced but isn't live yet.

One separate policy worth knowing about is the Clean Heat Market Mechanism. From April 2025 onwards, boiler manufacturers must match a rising percentage of their boiler sales (eight per cent in 2026/27) with MCS-certified heat-pump installs. That's why several manufacturer-owned brands now run their own discounted heat-pump offers. They need the installs to satisfy the mechanism, regardless of grant levels. It's a structural reason heat-pump installs will keep getting cheaper independent of what BUS does.

The install itself is the same regardless of what you're replacing. The savings against your current heating bill aren't. The fuel matters because it sets how quickly the heat pump pays back the bit that's left after the grant.

Mains gas is the hardest case. Gas is the cheapest mainstream UK heating fuel, so the price gap to electricity is small even on a heat-pump-friendly tariff. The £7,500 grant is what makes the maths work for most gas-heated homes. Without it, the payback period stretches well beyond a decade. With it, a typical semi pays back in five to eight years on running-cost savings alone, which is competitive with most home energy retrofits.

Oil is a clearer win. It's substantially more expensive than gas per kilowatt-hour, volatile in price, and a heat pump on a competitive electricity tariff usually pays back inside the system's lifetime even before the grant is counted. The grant just shortens the timeline. Households running off-grid on oil are typically the first cohort to find the financial case obvious rather than borderline.

LPG sits close to oil. Strong financial case, high motivation to switch.

Direct electric heating (storage heaters, panel heaters, electric boilers) is the strongest case of the four. A heat pump uses roughly a quarter of the electricity to deliver the same amount of heat, so the running cost falls by something close to a factor of three even before tariff optimisation. For homes off the gas grid that are currently on direct electric, the financial verdict is usually unambiguous.

The catch on direct electric is the up-front cost. A storage-heater home has no wet pipework or cylinder to start with, so an air-to-water install is closer to a full central-heating fit-out than a boiler swap. £10,000 or more after the £7,500 grant is typical, because the radiators, the cylinder and the pipework all go in from scratch. For some flats and maisonettes the air-to-air route in Edge cases below is the cheaper way in, at a £2,500 grant and a much shorter install. The running cost is the same. The up-front cost is the one to look at first.

None of this changes whether your home is technically suitable. Only how soon a heat pump pays for itself once it's in. The fuel-by-fuel running-cost numbers this section is built on are in the running-costs guide. The HeatPass verdict reports both.

The £7,500 BUS grant is for the heat pump itself. Insulation isn't included.

For most UK homes the verdict is that insulation isn't a prerequisite. A heat pump works in homes that aren't perfectly insulated. But where it is the prerequisite, or where an upgrade pays back regardless, there's usually a separate grant pot worth knowing about. These grants live alongside BUS, not inside it. The schemes that matter, in time order:

The shape of who can claim what splits cleanly by region. Most schemes are means-tested or eligibility-gated in some way. There is no pure free-money pot for insulation that everyone qualifies for.

In England, the two main routes are ECO4 and the Warm Homes: Local Grant. ECO4 is funded by the energy suppliers, delivered through approved installers, and ends on 31 December 2026. Eligibility is benefits-based or local-authority referral, with EPC bands D to G generally in scope. The Warm Homes: Local Grant is council-delivered (your council either runs a pot or doesn't), with full funding up to roughly £30,000 of upgrades for households on incomes up to about £36,000. The replacement for ECO4 from January 2027 onwards is the broader Warm Homes Plan, a £15 billion umbrella programme whose operational detail isn't fully published yet.

In Scotland, the Home Energy Scotland Grant + Loan is the universal route. It isn't means-tested. Up to £7,500 of grant plus £7,500 of interest-free loan for measures recommended on an EPC or equivalent assessment, and up to £15,000 combined when paired with the heat-pump side. Rural and island uplifts push the total to £18,000 in remote areas. Warmer Homes Scotland is the means-tested complement. It covers the broader package for households who qualify on benefits or health grounds.

In Wales, Nest is the single route. Means-tested by household income or qualifying benefit. Welsh Government funded. Covers insulation and heat pumps in one package.

Northern Ireland is in a transitional gap. The previous Affordable Warmth scheme closed at the end of March 2026, and the £150 million Warm Healthy Homes Fund that replaces it doesn't open until March 2027. Between those dates there is no national NI scheme. NI homeowners reaching this guide today should call the NI Energy Advice Service on 0800 111 4455, and ask their local NIHE office about residual support.

The Warm Homes Plan from January 2027 will redraw the map again. The shape it takes when it lands will determine how the English benefits-tested route works after ECO4 closes. The live council-delivered Local Grant is expected to fold into the Plan as the delivery channel.

Two of the high-street lenders run heat-pump-specific schemes for their own mortgage customers, separate from BUS and stackable with it.

Barclays' Greener Home Reward pays £1,000 cashback on an MCS-certified air-source or ground-source heat pump install, claimed within three months of the MCS certificate. The figure was £2,000 until January 2026, so older guides may still quote the old number.

Nationwide's Green Additional Borrowing lets Nationwide mortgage customers borrow £5,000 to £20,000 at 0 per cent for two or five years, then reverting to the Standard Mortgage Rate (currently 6.49 per cent variable). Heat pumps count as an eligible improvement. Up to 90 per cent loan-to-value, at least one mortgage payment already made.

Lloyds, Halifax and a handful of others run similar schemes that come and go. The route only helps if you hold the right mortgage, but on a £20,000 Nationwide loan over the full five years it saves around three to four thousand pounds in interest against the equivalent standard borrowing.

A heat pump install is often pitched as raising the home's EPC band, and therefore its market value. Under the current UK SAP methodology that backs the EPC, whether the rating actually goes up depends on what the heat pump is replacing.

The EPC score is energy-cost-weighted, not efficiency-weighted. The SAP calculation runs the property's modelled heat demand through whatever heating system is on file, costs it at standard fuel prices, and grades the result on cost per square metre. A heat pump's high SCOP only translates into a better EPC score if it actually cuts the modelled bill. At today's UK electricity-to-gas price ratio of roughly 4.3 times, breaking even on running cost against a 90 per cent efficient condensing gas boiler requires a heat pump SCOP of about 3.8. A typical install at SCOP 3.0 to 3.5 against a modern condensing boiler will usually land at a similar or slightly higher modelled cost, which moves the EPC score down rather than up. The mechanics of the UK ratio sit on the running-costs guide.

Replacing electric storage heaters, an old back-boiler, oil, or LPG is a clearer EPC win. The starting modelled cost is high and the heat pump cuts it materially even at typical SCOPs. For these cohorts the EPC direction is reliably up.

The Home Energy Model reform that the government has signalled, which will replace SAP and RdSAP, is expected to weight efficiency more heavily and lift heat-pump EPC outcomes against gas. Until that change lands, treat the EPC direction as fuel-dependent rather than automatic.

The practical version. If the goal is lower running cost, lower carbon, or future-proofing the property, a heat pump on a heat-pump-aware tariff is the right call regardless of where the EPC lands. If the goal is a specific EPC band uplift for value or letting purposes, work out the maths first on your starting fuel, your likely SCOP, and the cost ratio in force at the time of the install.

The MCS Data Dashboard publishes mean install costs by region. Across seven cuts examined in 2025: South East England £13,387, East England £12,218, South West England £13,274. Three local authorities sampled inside those regions came in at £15,493 (South Oxfordshire), £9,891 (Vale of White Horse) and £12,383 (Portsmouth). The spread looks dramatic, fifty-six per cent between the cheapest and the most expensive, until you split it open.

Underneath the regional means, the £/kW figure is stable: £1,534 to £1,725 across all seven cuts, a twelve per cent spread. What varies is the property-type mix. Wealthier rural areas (South Oxfordshire) skew toward larger detached homes that need bigger heat pumps. Tighter urban areas (Portsmouth) skew toward terraces and flats with smaller systems. The headline mean reflects who's installing, not the price per kilowatt.

The Vale of White Horse outlier — £9,891 against an Oxfordshire average of £15,493 in the next authority over — is the honest reminder that local installer markets do vary. A small sample (351 installs) makes it volatile, but it isn't a data error. Some local installer markets price genuinely lower than their neighbouring authorities. The HeatPass cost output reflects local installer averages where the dataset is dense enough to be defensible, and falls back to the regional figure where it isn't.

The practical takeaway: when you compare quotes, divide each by the proposed heat-pump kilowatt rating. If the £/kW figures across two installers differ by more than about fifteen per cent, ask why. Most of the time the answer is in the radiators or the cylinder rather than in the heat pump itself.

The straightforward cases are above. A few situations the standard picture doesn't cover:

• Air-to-air heat pumps are reversible air-conditioning units that heat (and cool) rooms directly with warm air, rather than running heated water through radiators. The BUS grant for these is £2,500, not £7,500. The advantage is a much simpler install: no cylinder, no radiator changes, which makes them the practical answer for some flats. The disadvantage is you don't get hot water out of them. That has to come from somewhere else. For most houses, the £7,500 path is still the better one.
• Biomass boilers (typically wood pellets) qualify for a £5,000 grant. The use case is rural homes with no gas connection, no realistic way to install a heat pump, and reliable access to local fuel. Most homes are better off with a heat pump.
• Hybrid systems (a heat pump alongside a backup gas boiler) aren't eligible for any grant. UK policy has settled on fully electric heat pumps as the supported direction.
• A combi boiler today means an additional £1,500 to £4,500 for a hot-water cylinder and the plumbing to connect it. The £7,500 grant doesn't change to compensate. The HeatPass cost output surfaces the cylinder figure separately rather than burying it in a single number.
• Radiator upgrades aren't covered by BUS. They land inside the installer's quote when they're needed.
• Solid-wall insulation, where it's the prerequisite to a viable heat pump, sits outside both BUS and most insulation grants because the cost-effectiveness threshold is higher than loft and cavity work. ECO4 and the devolved-nation schemes fund it for eligible households. For the owner-occupier majority outside means-tested routes, it's typically self-funded if it goes ahead.
• One grant per property. You can't stack the £7,500 air-to-water grant and the £2,500 air-to-air grant on the same home, even if you install both kinds of heat pump. A second property has its own application though, the limit is per property, not per applicant.