Great Yarmouth: £2,500 air-to-air heat pump grant

A real local pattern worth knowing: roughly 13.9% of Great Yarmouth's EPC-certified homes run on oil, LPG or solid fuel, well above what most English areas carry. If that is your home, replacing it with an air-to-air heat pump is usually where the £2,500 grant pays off hardest, since off-grid heating tends to be the priciest to run in the first place.

Mains gas heats 66.1% of the EPC-certified homes in Great Yarmouth, against 18.8% on electric and 13.9% on oil, LPG or solid fuel, typical annual heating costs across the property types we track here run around £554, band D is the commonest EPC rating here, covering 39% of rated homes and the fuel-mix split above is drawn from 99.9% of Great Yarmouth's EPC certificates, which makes it a genuine local measurement rather than a national average pinned to your postcode.

For a Great Yarmouth home, one decision settles whether the grant pays: replace your heating, or keep it. Both outcomes below carry equal weight - neither is the "default" answer.

Eligible - you replace your heating. If an air-to-air heat pump replaces a fossil-fuel or electric system (mains gas, oil, LPG, electric storage heaters or direct electric) and is fitted by an MCS-certified installer, the £2,500 applies, and the old system is decommissioned rather than run alongside the new one.

Not eligible - you keep your boiler. If you keep your existing heating and add cooling as a standalone unit, that cooling-only add-on does not qualify for the Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant, however it is marketed. Adding air conditioning while keeping your gas boiler is a private-pay job, carried out by an F-Gas / REFCOM-registered engineer rather than an MCS-certified one.

The grant itself is law and your eligibility is real, but no air-to-air product has reached the MCS Product Directory yet, so no installer can issue a Boiler Upgrade Scheme voucher today. Air-to-air enters MCS scheme scope on 5 December 2026, and vouchers follow once certified products list. Get quotes now, but treat the grant as pending rather than banked.

Grant rules as of August 2026 and subject to change, so always confirm the current terms on gov.uk before applying. This is a national scheme, so Great Yarmouth Council plays no part in deciding whether you qualify. Planning permission for the outdoor unit in Great Yarmouth, if you need it, is a different and entirely separate matter, covered on our planning pages.

MCS - the certification scheme for registered installers - is the quality standard your installer must hold for the grant to pay. It certifies the installer and the installation work, never the homeowner and never GetComfort.

We route a grant-eligible air-to-air enquiry from Great Yarmouth to an MCS-certified installer, and a cooling-only job to an F-Gas / REFCOM-registered engineer instead, because refrigerant-only work is what those engineers are licensed for. Confusing the two is the single most common mistake homeowners make when researching this grant.