Grants
Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant rises to £9,000 for oil and LPG homes, worth knowing if you're pairing solar with a heat pump
From 21 July 2026 the Boiler Upgrade Scheme increased its heat pump grant from £7,500 to £9,000 for homes currently heated by oil or LPG, covering an estimated 1.7 million UK households, while the ECO4 scheme that has funded some solar installs closes at the end of December 2026 with no direct replacement.
28 July 2026 · Source: OVO (solar-and-heating.ovo.com)
The £1,500 increase is targeted, not universal: it applies specifically to homes on oil or LPG heating, not mains gas, reflecting that off-grid heating households face the highest running costs and the strongest financial case for switching. If your Kent property is on oil or LPG and you've been weighing a heat pump alongside a solar install, this raises the grant enough that it is worth re-running the numbers even if you dismissed it before 21 July.
The scheme itself was already committed to running to 2030, so this is a rate increase within an existing programme rather than a new scheme with a hard deadline, which matters for planning: there is no immediate rush to apply before a cutoff, but there is no guarantee the £9,000 rate holds for the full remaining scheme life either.
The genuinely time-sensitive item in the same policy space is different: ECO4, which has funded roughly 5.75% of its measures as solar panel installations for qualifying low-income and vulnerable households, closes on 31 December 2026 with most of its funding already allocated. There is no ECO5. It is being replaced by the Warm Homes Local Grant, moving the delivery mechanism from an obligation on energy suppliers to direct government funding, backed by a confirmed £5 billion Warm Homes Fund offering low or zero interest loans for solar, batteries and heat pumps.
Watch the Warm Homes Local Grant's actual launch terms once published, since a change from supplier-obligation funding to direct government loans is a structurally different mechanism, not just a rename, and eligibility criteria may differ meaningfully from ECO4's. If you think you might qualify under the current ECO4 scheme, that is worth checking now given the 31 December 2026 close date, rather than waiting for the replacement scheme's terms to become clear.
Read the original: OVO (solar-and-heating.ovo.com). Commentary is Sandwich Solar's own editorial view; the original reporting is credited to its publisher.
More solar news
- ECO4 has been given a final nine-month extension to 31 December 2026, but the government has confirmed there will be no successor supplier obligation scheme after it closes
- The highest SEG export rate on the UK market right now, Octopus Intelligent Flux at up to 32.17p per kWh, is only available if you have a battery and an Octopus import tariff, which tells you where export income is actually heading
- The UK has passed 2.5 million MCS-certified installations across solar, battery storage and heat pumps combined, half a million more than the solar-only two million milestone we covered in May
- The government opened a call for evidence on community battery storage on 4 June 2026, asking whether shared street-level batteries could let renters and flat-dwellers benefit from solar-style savings without installing anything themselves