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

Like most of the areas we cover, Oxford sits close to the national pattern: around 82.6% of its EPC-certified homes heat on mains gas, 16.9% on electric, and a small remainder on oil, LPG or solid fuel. Whichever describes your home, the £2,500 grant works the same way: it pays when you replace that heating with an air-to-air heat pump fitted by an MCS-certified installer.

82.6% of Oxford's EPC-certified homes heat on mains gas, 16.9% on electric and 0.3% on oil, LPG or solid fuel, heating a home of the kinds we track locally runs to roughly £576 a year, band D is the commonest EPC rating here, covering 39% of rated homes and the fuel-mix split above is drawn from 99.1% of Oxford's EPC certificates, which makes it a genuine local measurement rather than a national average pinned to your postcode.

Whether the grant pays for your Oxford home comes down to a single decision: do you replace your heating, or keep it? We show both outcomes with equal weight, never as a blanket promise.

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 installer can be MCS-certified for air-to-air yet, so no Boiler Upgrade Scheme voucher can be issued today. Certified air-to-air products are already listed; installers can certify once the certification bodies gain UKAS accreditation, and MCS has not set a date for that. 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 Oxford Council plays no part in deciding whether you qualify. Planning permission for the outdoor unit in Oxford, 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.

From Oxford, a grant-eligible air-to-air job is routed to an MCS-certified installer, while a pure cooling job goes to an F-Gas / REFCOM-registered engineer - the licence that covers refrigerant-only work. Homeowners researching this grant mix the two up more than anything else.