Grants

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

Following last year's consultation, ECO4 now runs to 31 December 2026 instead of closing this spring, giving eligible households a final window for free or subsidised solar, battery and insulation measures before the scheme winds down for good and support moves to the publicly funded Warm Homes Plan.

31 July 2026 · Source: Energy Trust

The detail that matters more than the extension itself is the sentence that came with it: no further extensions, and no successor supplier obligation. ECO4 has been the mechanism that funded a large share of free and part-funded solar and battery installs for eligible households over the past several years, paid for by a levy on energy suppliers rather than general taxation. Once it closes at the end of December, that funding route stops existing in its current form, not just pauses.

What replaces it is structurally different, not just renamed. The Warm Homes Plan is publicly funded, backed by a headline £15bn commitment, rather than funded through a supplier obligation passed through to customer bills. That is a genuine change in who pays and how the scheme is administered, and the transition period between ECO4 closing and Warm Homes Plan funding routes being fully operational is exactly the kind of gap where eligible households can fall through if they wait rather than apply now.

For anyone in Kent who qualifies under ECO4's eligibility criteria, primarily benefits-based means testing, the practical read is that this is genuinely a closing window rather than a routine renewal. Nine months sounds like a long runway, but installer capacity, survey backlogs and paperwork processing time all eat into that window faster than the headline date suggests, particularly as awareness of the final deadline pushes more applications through the same pipeline in the second half of the year.

This also reframes how we'd advise anyone weighing ECO4 eligibility against paying for a system outright. If you qualify and have been putting off applying, the calculation has changed: this is the last version of this specific funding mechanism, not one of an ongoing series. Whatever the Warm Homes Plan eventually offers, it is a different scheme with its own separate eligibility and application process, not a continuation of ECO4 under a new name.

Read the original: Energy Trust. Commentary is Sandwich Solar's own editorial view; the original reporting is credited to its publisher.

Get a solar quote See MCS installations