St Helens: £2,500 air-to-air heat pump grant

Around 94.7% of St Helens's EPC-certified homes heat on mains gas - one of the highest concentrations in our coverage. With so few homes on anything else, the grant question locally is really just about willingness to replace an existing gas boiler with an air-to-air heat pump.

Mains gas heats 94.7% of the EPC-certified homes in St Helens, against 4.4% on electric and 0.6% on oil, LPG or solid fuel, a typical year's heating across the property types we profile here costs about £552, band D is the commonest EPC rating here, covering 45% of rated homes and 99.8% of St Helens's EPC certificates sit behind that fuel-mix split, so it is measured locally rather than estimated nationally and applied to you.

For a St Helens 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. Eligibility here is decided nationally, not by St. Helens Council - the council has no role in the grant itself. Where the outdoor unit needs planning permission in St Helens, that question is separate, and our planning pages walk through it.

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 St Helens 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.