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

Heating in Plymouth follows a fairly ordinary England-wide split: about 87.5% mains gas, 11.1% electric, and a small tail on oil, LPG or solid fuel. Whatever your own home runs on, the grant rule is the same everywhere - replace it with an air-to-air heat pump via an MCS-certified installer and the payment applies.

87.5% of Plymouth's EPC-certified homes heat on mains gas, 11.1% on electric and 0.8% on oil, LPG or solid fuel, typical annual heating costs across the property types we track here run around £589, 44% of rated homes sit at EPC band D, the local mode and the fuel-mix split above is drawn from 99.2% of Plymouth'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 Plymouth 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 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 - Plymouth Council has no say over your eligibility for it. If your Plymouth 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 Plymouth 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.