Home energy grants: the full 2026 map

Home energy grants used to be simple to point at: for years the answer was ECO or the Great British Insulation Scheme, both paid for through energy suppliers. That has changed. The Great British Insulation Scheme ended on 31 March 2026, and ECO4 closes on 31 December 2026. What sits in their place is not one replacement scheme but three separate routes, and the single most useful thing to work out before you apply anywhere is which of them is a grant you keep and which is a loan you repay.

This page maps all three. It says who each one is for, what each funds, and where the lines between them fall. There is more on how the old schemes wound down in our note on the ECO4 scheme being replaced.

Grants and loans are not the same pot

The words get blurred online, so start here. A grant is money you are given and never pay back, and it is almost always tied to either a low household income or a single named measure. A loan is money you borrow and repay with interest. The Warm Homes Loan is the odd one out, because it is borrowing that a government grant makes cheaper, but you still repay the capital.

That distinction decides everything downstream. Grants are rationed by need, so they run out and they gatekeep on income or benefits. Loans are open to anyone a lender will approve, with no income ceiling. Knowing which side of the line you fall on saves you filling in the wrong form.

There is a second reason the change matters. ECO4 and GBIS were paid for by energy suppliers and recovered through everyone's bills, so supply was capped by what suppliers were obliged to deliver. The routes replacing them are funded differently, through the government's Warm Homes Plan, which carries around £15 billion of capital across this Parliament. The money did not vanish. It moved, and the door you knock on is a different one now.

The three routes still open

Here are the routes a household in England can actually use, side by side. Two are grants; one is subsidised borrowing.

Notice the overlap in the middle column. Heat pumps appear three times, solar twice. That is why people apply to the wrong place. The measure alone does not tell you the route; your income and whether you want free money or cheaper borrowing does.

Warm Homes: Local Grant, the means-tested route

This is the grant most people picture when they say home energy grants, and it is the only one of the three that pays for insulation. It funds loft, cavity and solid wall insulation, draught-proofing and glazing, plus solar, batteries and heat pumps for households that qualify. Funding runs up to £15,000 for energy efficiency measures and a further £15,000 for low-carbon heating, so up to £30,000 per property in total.

The catch is eligibility. It is aimed at lower-income households in England whose home has a poor energy rating, so it gatekeeps on income, benefits and Energy Performance Certificate band. The rating gate is specific: the scheme targets homes rated between D and G, the leakier end of the scale, because that is where fabric-first savings are largest. Your local authority runs the delivery, not central government, which is why availability varies by postcode. The scheme is funded to run to March 2028. Our full page on the Warm Homes: Local Grant walks through who counts as eligible and how the local delivery works.

Landlords can use it too, on different terms from an owner-occupier: full funding for a first eligible property and reduced funding for further ones, which matters for anyone upgrading a small portfolio. It also reaches off-gas-grid homes, the ones heated by oil, coal or bottled gas, which the older supplier schemes often served last. If your property sits off the gas network and your income is modest, this is usually the strongest route on the table.

Boiler Upgrade Scheme, the heat pump grant

The Boiler Upgrade Scheme is the narrow one: a flat £7,500 off an air source or ground source heat pump that replaces a fossil-fuel boiler. There is no income test. Any homeowner in England or Wales with a suitable property can use it, and the grant is claimed by your MCS-certified installer rather than by you, so it comes off the quote directly.

What it will not do is cover the whole job. A heat pump install often lands well above the grant once radiators, pipework and a hot water cylinder are counted, and the Boiler Upgrade Scheme leaves that gap for you to fund. That is exactly where the loan comes in. There is more detail on stacking and eligibility on our heat pump grants page.

Because it is neither means-tested nor rationed the way a local scheme is, it is the most predictable of the three to plan around. The one firm condition is that you are replacing a fossil-fuel or old electric heating system, not bolting a heat pump onto a working boiler. Get the survey done, and the installer handles the paperwork.

Warm Homes Loan, for everyone the grants miss

If your income is above the Local Grant threshold and the Boiler Upgrade Scheme only covers part of the cost, the Warm Homes Loan is the route built for you. It is not a grant. It is a loan from an approved lender, made cheaper because the government pays that lender a grant of up to 20% of the loan, which lowers the interest rate you are charged. It funds heat pumps to £20,000, solar to £15,000, plus battery storage and rural biomass. It does not fund insulation.

The loan suits two groups in particular. Owner-occupiers whose income rules them out of the Local Grant but who still want to spread the cost of a heat pump or solar array, and private landlords, who can borrow on a personal basis with no income ceiling to enter. Lenders run their usual affordability checks, and the reduced rate is built into what they can offer rather than claimed back separately.

The important move is that it stacks with the Boiler Upgrade Scheme. Take the £7,500 grant off the heat pump first, then borrow the balance through the loan at the reduced rate. Public loans are expected from September 2026. Our guide to the Warm Homes Loan Scheme covers the caps and the lender process in full.

How to choose in one pass

Work it in order. First, is your household on a lower income or means-tested benefits? If yes, check the Warm Homes: Local Grant before anything else, because a grant beats a loan every time and it is the only route that touches insulation. Second, do you mainly want a heat pump? Claim the Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant regardless of income, then decide how to fund the rest.

Third, if a grant leaves a gap or you do not qualify for one, the Warm Homes Loan fills it. One rule holds across all three: never spend an application on the wrong door. You cannot draw the Boiler Upgrade Scheme and the Local Grant for the same heat pump, and the loan will not pay for the insulation the Local Grant covers.

A worked example makes the ordering plain. A lower-income household in an older, poorly rated home checks the Local Grant first, because it can fund both insulation and a heat pump with nothing to repay. A higher earner wanting the same heat pump claims the Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant, then borrows the balance through the Warm Homes Loan. Same measure, two different routes, decided almost entirely by income.

Common questions

One last caution. The Warm Home Discount, the £150 rebate on your electricity bill, is not a home upgrade grant and has nothing to do with any of these routes; if a bill rebate is what you need, search that name instead. For everything else, start from your income and your measure, not the marketing. The funding wizard asks a handful of questions and points you at the grant or loan that opens for you.