Warm Homes: Local Grant: Who Qualifies, How Much & How to Apply

With 100% Free Upgrades Available, It’s Easy To Find Yourself in a Long Queue.

If your home leaks heat, your bills keep climbing and a £10,000 retrofit is out of reach, the Warm Homes: Local Grant is the most generous help available in England right now. Eligible homeowners pay nothing, and councils can spend an average of £16,600 per home on insulation and solar, plus another £16,600 on a heat pump.

The rules are simpler than they look. Your home needs a poor energy rating, your household needs a low income (or benefits, or the right postcode), and your council needs money left in its pot. That last test is the one that catches people out.

By the end of this guide you’ll know whether you qualify, what you’re likely to get, how to apply without paying a middleman, and what to do if your council has paused. We’ll also run the numbers on two things most guides skip: whether a free heat pump will cut your bills, and what free solar panels are worth in pounds.

Who qualifies for the Warm Homes: Local Grant?

You qualify if you pass three tests: the home, the household and the location. Pass all three and your council can fund the work. Fail one and the answer is no, however cold the house is.

Earning more than £36,000? You might still qualify

The £36,000 limit is gross income, before tax, and it counts every adult in the home except lodgers and full-time students. Disability benefits such as PIP, DLA and Attendance Allowance are left out of the sum.

There’s also a second income test that most people never hear about. Take your household’s take-home pay, subtract your rent or mortgage payments (not council tax or energy bills), and compare what’s left with the limit for your household below.

Here’s how that plays out for a hypothetical family. Two parents each earn £22,000, so the household grosses £44,000 and fails the headline test. After tax and National Insurance they take home roughly £38,700. Their mortgage is £900 a month, or £10,800 a year. That leaves about £27,900. With three children, their limit is £32,000. They qualify.

How much is the Warm Homes: Local Grant worth?

Up to £16,600 for energy performance upgrades and another £16,600 for low-carbon heating, so £33,200 for a home that needs both. The government raised both caps from £15,000 in its mid-2026 guidance update to account for inflation, and the higher figures apply across the whole scheme.

Those caps are averages, not fixed limits per home. Your council has to hit them across every property it treats by the time the scheme closes. A solid-wall terrace that needs external wall insulation can go over, balanced by a bungalow that only needs loft insulation and solar.

The two pots don’t mix. The heating money only comes into play when a heat pump or another low-carbon heating system is installed, so if your heating doesn’t need replacing, that half can’t be spent on extra insulation or a bigger solar array.

You never receive cash. The council pays its contractors directly. Owner-occupiers can’t be asked to contribute, although you can choose to pay for extras the assessor didn’t recommend, such as cosmetic finishes, if the council agrees.

What the grant pays for, and what it won’t

It pays for almost anything that improves your energy rating without burning fossil fuel. You don’t pick from a menu. A retrofit assessor surveys the home, and the council funds the package that saves the most money for the budget.

What households are actually getting

Solar is the most common upgrade by a distance, which surprises people who assume this is an insulation grant. Councils had reported around 11,250 measures in 5,470 homes by the end of July 2026, about two per home.

The government’s own guidance explains the pattern. A package of solar panels, smart controls and a battery can deliver bigger bill savings for less money than insulation in some homes, so assessors choose it where it fits. If your roof faces south, east or west with little shade, expect solar to be on the table.

How to apply for the Warm Homes: Local Grant

Apply through the free GOV.UK eligibility checker, which passes your details to your council. You don’t need a company to apply for you. Some firms advertise help getting ahead in the queue, but the council decides who goes first, not them.

Paperwork to have ready

• Photo ID for the person applying.
• Proof you own the home, such as a mortgage statement, or your tenancy agreement if you rent.
• Proof of address, such as a council tax bill.
• Income evidence for every adult who earns: payslips, P60s or bank statements.
• A benefit award letter if you’re qualifying through benefits.
• Rent or mortgage statements if you’re using the after housing costs route.

Expect months, not weeks. Councils warn that the journey from application to finished work can take several months, and longer where there’s a waiting list.

Why your council might say not yet

Because the money runs out long before the demand does. £500 million sounds like a lot. Spread across England, it isn’t.

Councils can spend up to 15% of their allocation running the scheme, which leaves about £425 million for actual work. If the average home gets £15,000 to £20,000 of upgrades, that pays for roughly 21,000 to 28,000 homes over three years. England had an estimated 2.36 million fuel-poor households in 2025. That’s about one funded home for every 100 in fuel poverty (our estimate).

Delivery so far fits that picture. Around 5,470 homes had been reported as upgraded by the end of July 2026, 16 months in, with TrustMark records suggesting about 6,700 once paperwork catches up.

Funding is also released a year at a time. Stoke-on-Trent, for example, has already used its allocation for April 2026 to March 2027 and has stopped taking new applications for now.

Should you accept a free heat pump? Run this sum first

If you heat with oil, LPG, coal or plug-in electric heaters, almost certainly yes. If you’re on mains gas, a free heat pump may save you very little on a standard tariff, which is why the rules make the final decision yours.

Here’s the maths at the October to December 2026 price cap. Gas costs 7.97p per kWh and electricity 26.32p, on average for Direct Debit customers. A gas boiler turns roughly 88% of its fuel into heat, so each unit of heat costs about 9.1p. A heat pump’s efficiency is its SCOP, the units of heat it delivers for each unit of electricity. At a SCOP of 3, each unit of heat costs 26.32p divided by 3. That’s 8.8p. The saving over gas is a fraction of a penny.

The pattern is clear: installation quality matters more than the grant. A well-designed system with the right radiators and low flow temperatures can run at a SCOP of 3.5 or better. A rushed one can run at 2.5 and cost more than the boiler it replaced. For homes on direct electric heating, even a mediocre heat pump cuts heating costs by 60% or more.

Two things shift these numbers. Electricity is VAT-free only until 31 March 2027, after which heat pump running costs rise by 5%. In the other direction, a cheaper overnight time-of-use tariff, or solar panels installed through the same grant, can pull costs well below the table. You can test your own setup with our solar and heat pump savings calculator.

What free solar panels and a battery are worth

A typical solar and battery package would cost £8,000 to £10,500 privately, and save a household roughly £560 to £730 a year at current prices. Here’s what a common grant package would cost if you paid for it yourself.

The whole package fits inside the energy performance cap, which is why solar-plus-insulation bundles are so common. For a full breakdown of what drives the solar line, see our guides to solar panel costs and solar battery costs.

Now the savings. A 4kW system in the UK generates about 3,400 kWh a year. Without a battery, a household that’s home in the day might use 40% of it. That’s 1,360 kWh at 26.32p, a saving of £358. The other 2,040 kWh goes to the grid, and at a 10p export rate that earns £204. Total, about £560 a year.

Add a 5kWh battery and self-use climbs to around 70%. That’s 2,380 kWh at 26.32p, or £626, plus £102 of exports. Total, about £730 a year. Export rates range from about 4p to 15p depending on your supplier, so treat that part as the least certain. Because grant installs are MCS certified, you can sign up for the Smart Export Guarantee once you have a smart meter that records exports.

Landlords and private tenants: the rules

Private landlords get one home fully funded across the whole scheme, then pay half the cost on every property after that. Tenants never pay anything.

These are the maximum average amounts. Landlords can put in more than half if they want to. A few conditions come attached, and they’re stricter than most landlords expect:

• It’s the tenant’s income that counts, not the landlord’s. The tenant has to pass one of the income routes.
• Landlords sign a declaration not to raise the rent as a direct result of the upgrades.
• Homes rated F or G need a registered exemption from the minimum energy efficiency rules first, because the grant can’t pay to make a home legal to let.
• The one-free-home limit is tracked nationally against title deeds, so it applies across every council, not per council.
• The government has said the landlord offer is under review and could change before 2028.

If you rent, your landlord has to agree to the work. Talk to them first, then contact your council directly.

Can you combine it with other schemes?

Yes, as long as two schemes don’t pay for the same thing. ECO4 could fund your wall insulation and the local grant your heat pump, for example, but the ECO4 work has to be finished before the grant work starts, or begin after it ends.

If your income is too high for the local grant, the Boiler Upgrade Scheme is the fallback for a heat pump, but you can’t use both on the same heat pump. In Scotland, see our guide to the Home Energy Scotland grant and loan, and for everything else on offer, our round-up of solar panel government grants.

What happens when the grant ends in 2028?

Delivery runs until 31 March 2028, and the government plans to merge it with the social housing fund into a single scheme for low-income homes from 2027/28. That sits inside the £15 billion Warm Homes Plan, which commits £4.4 billion to low-income grants.

Households who don’t qualify for grants are the target for government-backed low and zero-interest loans for solar, batteries and heat pumps, expected to phase in from 2027. Until then, our guide to solar panel financing covers what’s available now.

We couldn’t find final eligibility rules for the merged scheme at the time of writing, so waiting for it is a gamble. If you qualify now, apply now.

Warm Homes: Local Grant FAQs