The £9,000 oil and LPG heat pump grant goes live on 21 July 2026, and every installer will lead with the headline. The move that matters is quieter. It is how you word the quote so that you, not the installer, keep the extra £1,500.
What changed
From 21 July 2026, an off-gas-grid home replacing an oil or LPG boiler with an air-source or ground-source heat pump gets £9,000 from the Boiler Upgrade Scheme instead of the standard £7,500. Gas-grid, electric and other homes stay on £7,500. It is a one-year uplift for the 2026/27 financial year, and it is expected to fall back to £7,500 at the end of it, so treat the extra £1,500 as this year’s window rather than a permanent feature. The mechanics of how the grant is paid, and how it stacks with insulation grants, are in our cost and grants guide.
That is the whole announcement. Now the part nobody else covers.
You never touch the grant money
You do not apply for the Boiler Upgrade Scheme, and you never see the cash. Your MCS-certified installer applies on your behalf, discounts your quote by the grant amount, and reclaims it from Ofgem after the install. That is standard practice and there is no other way it works. It also means the grant is only real to you if the installer’s claim succeeds. If the claim is delayed, or the paperwork trips, you are exposed to whatever the quote said.
The current BUS claim window is 120 days after the install. That gap is where the risk lives. An installer who quotes you a “£9,000 grant passed on” is handing you a number that depends on their claim landing inside that window. If it slips, someone wears the difference, and by default the wording makes it you.
Ask for a discount, not a passed-on grant
The fix is one line of wording. Ask the installer to write the quote as a £7,500 standard grant plus a separate, explicit £1,500 installer discount, rather than a single “£9,000 grant” line.
It reads like a cosmetic change. It is not. A passed-on grant is contingent on the installer’s claim. An explicit discount is a price you have agreed, in writing, regardless of what happens with the claim. Splitting the two puts the £1,500 of claim-timing risk back on the installer, which is where it belongs, because they are the ones who control the application and its timing.
What you lock in
Both quotes are worth £9,000 today. Only the split wording keeps the extra £1,500 yours if the claim runs late.
- One "£9,000 grant" line
- £7,500Locked in
- £7,500 grant + £1,500 written discount
- £9,000Locked in
This is not a trick and it is not adversarial. A confident installer has no reason to refuse, because they expect the claim to land anyway. An installer who resists is telling you they want you to carry a risk they are better placed to carry. That alone is worth knowing before you sign.
The point bites hardest around the changeover. In the weeks before 21 July, some installers were offering to fit now and apply the £9,000 early, absorbing the timing risk themselves to win the work. That is a real selling point for anyone with a dead boiler who cannot wait. Just make sure the contract says the £1,500 is the installer’s risk, not yours, if the uplifted grant lands late.
The honest caveats
Three things keep this in proportion. The uplift is for off-gas-grid oil and LPG homes only, so a gas or electric home does not get it. It covers air-source and ground-source heat pumps, not air-to-air or biomass. And it is a one-year measure that is expected to revert to £7,500, so it is not a reason to rush a bad install to beat a deadline. The right time to switch is still when your boiler is near the end of its life and the install is designed well, not when a grant table changes.
If you want the numbers for your own home rather than a worked example, a HeatPass check runs the same maths against your property, including the £9,000 grant if you are on oil or LPG, in about two minutes.
The headline is the easy part. Keeping the extra £1,500 is a sentence in a quote, and it is yours to ask for.