Stoke-on-Trent: £2,500 air-to-air heat pump grant

Stoke-on-Trent is heavily on mains gas: around 90.5% of its EPC-certified homes heat this way, among the highest shares we track anywhere. For most readers here, the grant question is the straightforward one - does replacing that gas boiler with an air-to-air heat pump make sense - rather than a question about an unusual heating type.

90.5% of Stoke-on-Trent's EPC-certified homes heat on mains gas, 8.6% on electric and 0.6% on oil, LPG or solid fuel, heating a home of the kinds we track locally runs to roughly £600 a year, the most common EPC band locally is D (46% of rated homes) and 99.2% of Stoke-on-Trent's EPC certificates sit behind that fuel-mix split, so it is measured locally rather than estimated nationally and applied to you.

Whether the grant pays for your Stoke-on-Trent 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. Eligibility here is decided nationally, not by Stoke-on-Trent Council - the council has no role in the grant itself. Where the outdoor unit needs planning permission in Stoke-on-Trent, 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 Stoke-on-Trent 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.