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

Southampton runs noticeably more on electric heating than most of the areas we track: around 32.7% of its EPC-certified homes are on electric storage or direct-electric systems. That matters here because the grant pays just as much for replacing direct-electric heating as it does a gas boiler, so a meaningfully bigger share of homes in Southampton than elsewhere may already sit on a grant-eligible heating type without realising it.

The split across Southampton's EPC-certified stock is 66.4% mains gas, 32.7% electric and 0.3% oil, LPG or solid fuel, heating a home of the kinds we track locally runs to roughly £498 a year, the most common EPC band locally is D (37% of rated homes) and this fuel-mix figure covers 98.6% of Southampton's EPC certificates, so it is a real, high-confidence local read, not a national estimate applied to your postcode.

For a Southampton 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. The grant itself is a national government scheme - Southampton Council has no say over your eligibility for it. If your Southampton 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.

We route a grant-eligible air-to-air enquiry from Southampton 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.