The warm homes plan: what it covers and who runs it

The warm homes plan is the government's umbrella programme for cutting home energy bills and carbon across England, and it is run by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, known as DESNZ. It works as a policy and a budget rather than a single application form. Behind it sits around £15 billion of committed capital, shared across several separate schemes that each fund different measures for different households. This page maps the money and the structure. For what the loan inside it actually pays for and the caps by measure, our companion guide to the Warm Homes Loan has the detail.

One name, one department, one large budget, and three schemes doing the actual work. Worth pulling those apart.

What the plan actually is

Most people meet the warm homes plan as a phrase in a news headline or a leaflet, and assume it is a scheme they can fill in a form for. It is not. Think of it as the roof over a set of rooms. The roof is the strategy and the budget; the rooms are the schemes that pay real money to real households. When a minister talks about the plan, they mean the whole building. When you want a heat pump funded, you walk into one of the rooms.

That distinction matters because it changes where you look. There is no single warm homes plan helpline and no central eligibility check. Support flows through whichever scheme underneath the plan matches your income, your tenure and the measure you want. Getting that mapping right first saves a wasted application later, and the funding wizard is built to do exactly that sorting in a couple of minutes.

The money behind it

The headline number is around £15 billion of committed capital for the programme over the current spending period. That is a large figure by the standards of past home energy schemes, and it did not arrive in one lump. Part of it grew as ECO4 wound down.

When the government confirmed ECO4 would close without a successor, it took £1.5 billion that had been tied to that supplier obligation and redirected it into direct grant funding within the plan, chiefly the council-led Local Grant and social housing work. So the envelope is not just bigger than earlier schemes; it is funded differently. ECO4 was paid for by levies on energy suppliers, which they recovered through everyone's bills. The plan is paid for out of the government's own budget. That single change is why ministers were willing to end the obligation model rather than run an ECO5.

The money is not held in one account you draw from. It is divided between the schemes below, and each scheme has its own rules on who gets it and how much.

The three schemes under the plan

Three programmes carry the plan into people's homes. They serve different households and pay in different ways, which is the whole point of having more than one.

The loan is the borrowing route. It suits people who can afford to repay over a few years and want a cheaper rate than a normal personal loan, and it funds low-carbon measures such as heat pumps and solar rather than insulation. Our Warm Homes Loan Scheme guide covers who qualifies and how the reduced rate is built.

The Warm Homes: Local Grant is the grant route, means-tested and run by your local council. It is the part of the plan that covers insulation, which the loan does not touch. If your household income is low or you claim certain benefits, this is usually the door to try first.

The Boiler Upgrade Scheme sits slightly apart. It predates the plan but now works alongside it, and its flat grant can stack with the loan. Take the £7,500 off a heat pump first, then borrow the balance through the loan at the reduced rate. Grant for part of the job, cheap borrowing for the rest.

Who runs and delivers it

DESNZ owns the plan. It sets the budget, writes the scheme rules and decides the caps, dates and eligibility that everything downstream has to follow. What DESNZ does not do is process your individual application, and this trips people up.

Delivery is deliberately spread out. The Local Grant is run by councils, who verify eligibility and arrange installs in their own areas, which is why the same grant can look slightly different from one authority to the next. The loan runs through approved private lenders, who apply their own affordability checks while passing on the government-backed discount. The Boiler Upgrade Scheme is administered centrally through Ofgem and your installer. So the plan is one strategy delivered through three very different sets of hands, and knowing which set to approach is half the battle.

How it succeeds ECO4

For a decade, the main engine of home energy support was the Energy Company Obligation, most recently ECO4. It worked by placing a legal duty on larger energy suppliers to fund upgrades in low-income homes, and the cost of meeting that duty landed back on customers through their bills. ECO4 closes on 31 December 2026, and DESNZ has confirmed no ECO5 or successor supplier obligation will follow it.

The plan is what fills that space, and it does so with a different mechanism. Instead of obliging suppliers and recovering the cost through bills, the government funds the work directly and hands delivery to councils and lenders. The measures overlap with what ECO4 paid for, especially insulation for lower-income homes, but the route in has changed. Anyone who was relying on an ECO4 upgrade needs to understand where the support has moved, and our guide to how the ECO4 scheme is being replaced walks through that handover in full.

Common questions

The plan is big, but your part of it is small and specific: one scheme, one set of rules, one application. Public loans are expected from September 2026, the Local Grant runs through councils, and the Boiler Upgrade Scheme is open now. Work out which of the three is yours before you fill in anything, and the around £15 billion behind the programme starts to mean something for your actual home.