Islington: £2,500 air-to-air heat pump grant

There is nothing unusual about Islington's heating profile: roughly 85.6% mains gas and 13.8% electric, with the rest on oil, LPG or solid fuel. That ordinariness does not change what the grant needs from you - a genuine replacement of your existing heating, done by an MCS-certified installer.

Mains gas heats 85.6% of the EPC-certified homes in Islington, against 13.8% on electric and 0.3% on oil, LPG or solid fuel, typical annual heating costs across the property types we track here run around £520, 47% of rated homes sit at EPC band D, the local mode and this fuel-mix figure covers 92.8% of Islington's EPC certificates, so it is a real, high-confidence local read, not a national estimate applied to your postcode.

Everything about whether the grant pays a Islington homeowner turns on one choice: replacing the existing heating, or leaving it in place. We set out both routes with the same weight, not as a blanket promise either way.

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. The grant itself is a national government scheme - the London Borough of Islington has no say over your eligibility for it. If your Islington home also needs planning permission for the outdoor unit, that is a separate, local question our planning pages cover.

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.

An air-to-air enquiry from Islington that qualifies for the grant goes to an MCS-certified installer; a cooling-only job goes to an F-Gas / REFCOM-registered engineer instead, since that is the licence refrigerant-only work actually requires. Mixing the two accreditations up is the mistake we see most often.