Air-to-Air Heat Pump Grant UK: What the BUS Scheme Actually Pays

If you have read otherwise on a major installer or comparison site, that information is wrong or badly out of date. The Boiler Upgrade Scheme extended to cover air-to-air systems on 28 April 2026, confirmed by gov.uk and Ofgem. This page sets out exactly what the grant pays, who actually qualifies, and where the confusion online is coming from, so you can work out your own position without wading through installer sales pitches.

What the BUS grant pays for air-to-air heat pumps

The Boiler Upgrade Scheme (BUS) is the government’s main grant for low carbon heating in England and Wales. It has existed since 2022, but air-to-air heat pumps were only added to the scheme on 28 April 2026. That is recent enough that a lot of published content, including from sites that should know better, has not caught up.

Here is what the scheme currently pays, for orientation:

System	Grant amount
Air-to-water or ground source heat pump	£7,500
Biomass boiler (rural, off gas grid only)	£5,000
Air-to-air heat pump	£2,500

The air-to-air figure is the smallest of the three. That is partly because air-to-air systems are also the cheapest to buy and install, so £2,500 represents a proportionally larger contribution than it looks on paper. It is a discount applied by your installer, not a smaller version of the same grant.

Who qualifies, and who does not

This is the part most pages online get wrong or skip entirely. Qualifying for the air-to-air heat pump grant UK scheme depends on meeting all of the following conditions, not just some of them.

The conditions in full

Your property must be in England or Wales. Scotland runs a separate scheme through Home Energy Scotland, with different amounts and rules.

Your property must be residential. Non-residential buildings are explicitly excluded from the air-to-air grant.

The air-to-air system must fully replace an existing fossil fuel heating system (gas, oil or LPG) or an existing electric heating system such as storage heaters. It cannot be added alongside a system you intend to keep. The old system has to come out.

Your installer must be MCS certified. The application is installer-led, meaning your installer applies to Ofgem for the grant voucher on your behalf, not you.

Your property cannot be social housing.

You cannot already have received government funding or support for a heat pump or biomass boiler on the same property.

The requirement most buyers miss

The replacement condition is the single biggest reason people assume they qualify and then do not. An installer with a financial interest in the sale has every reason to gloss over this. We do not. If your existing heating system stays in place after the air-to-air unit goes in, you have installed a cooling system, not a heating replacement, and the grant will not apply. Be honest with yourself about which one you are actually doing before you get your hopes up on the £2,500.

What the application process actually involves

The process is designed so the homeowner never has to handle the money or the paperwork directly. In practice it works like this:

You contact MCS-certified installers and get quotes for the work.

Your chosen installer applies to Ofgem for a grant voucher on your behalf once you have agreed to proceed.

Ofgem contacts you directly to confirm your consent, usually within around 14 days of the application.

Once the voucher is issued, your installer has three months to complete the installation.

The £2,500 is applied as an upfront discount on your final invoice. You are never sent the grant money and never asked to claim it back.

The 0% VAT benefit, separate from the grant

Alongside the BUS grant, air-to-air heat pump installations currently qualify for 0% VAT under the energy-saving materials relief. This runs from 1 April 2022 to 31 March 2027, according to HMRC, and applies regardless of whether you receive the BUS grant. The two benefits stack. If you qualify for both, you get the £2,500 discount and you pay no VAT on the installation itself.

If you do not qualify for the BUS grant, because you are not replacing your existing heating system, you may still benefit from the 0% VAT relief on its own. Ask your installer to confirm this applies to your specific quote before you sign anything.

How to check if your installer is MCS certified

Because the grant is installer-led, the certification of the company you choose matters more than it would for a normal purchase. Do not take an installer’s word for it that they are MCS certified. MCS publishes a live, searchable directory at mcscertified.com. Check any installer against it before agreeing to proceed, and be wary of anyone who resists the check or claims certification is “in progress.”

Why so much of the internet still gets this wrong

Several well-known sites currently tell readers that no BUS grant exists for air conditioning or air-to-air systems, full stop. That was accurate before 28 April 2026, and some of those pages simply have not been updated since. Others describe BUS as applying only to air-to-water systems, which was true of the original scheme but has not been true since air-to-air was added earlier this year. If you have come across advice like this, it is not that the site is lying to you. It is that the scheme changed faster than a lot of published content did, and correcting that is exactly what this page is for.

The one thing worth being clear-eyed about: this is a young addition to the scheme, having launched only a few months ago. If you are quoted anything that treats the air-to-air grant as long established, that is a smaller signal of how carefully the source has checked its facts.

Where this leaves you

If you are fully replacing a gas, oil, LPG or electric heating system with an air-to-air heat pump in a residential property in England or Wales, using an MCS-certified installer, you are very likely eligible for the £2,500 air-to-air heat pump grant UK scheme, on top of 0% VAT if it applies to your job. If you are adding air-to-air purely for summer cooling and keeping your existing heating system running, you should proceed on the basis that the grant will not apply to your job and price accordingly. Either way, ask your installer to confirm your specific eligibility in writing before you commit, since the voucher application sits with them, not with you.

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