Last updated: 11 September 2026
29 weeks remain to apply for the £9,000 rate. Applications must reach Ofgem by 31 March 2027, which means booking a survey by around January 2027.
If your home is off the mains gas grid and heated by oil or LPG, the Boiler Upgrade Scheme will pay £9,000 towards an air source or ground source heat pump rather than the standard £7,500.
The uplift applies to applications made on or after 21 July 2026 and no later than 31 March 2027. It’s aimed at the roughly 1.7 million households in England and Wales that heat with oil or LPG, most of them rural.
Two things to understand before you read further. The eligibility rules are narrower than “I don’t use gas”, and there’s one disqualifier that catches a lot of people. And because the deadline applies to the application rather than the installation, the practical cut-off for starting the process is considerably earlier than March.
Do you actually qualify?
All of these must be true:
You own the property in England or Wales. Homeowners and small non-domestic properties qualify. Scotland and Northern Ireland have separate schemes.
The property is off the gas grid, by the scheme’s definition. This is stricter than it sounds, and it’s covered properly below.
Your current heating runs on oil or LPG. Not electric, not solid fuel, not an existing heat pump. The system being replaced must be oil or LPG.
You’re installing an air-to-water or ground source heat pump. Air-to-air systems and biomass boilers do not get the uplift. They’re still eligible for BUS at their own rates, £2,500 and £5,000 respectively, just not for the £9,000.
The property isn’t a new build.
There’s no income test. Your earnings are not assessed and you don’t need to be on benefits.
The disqualifier most people miss
“Off the gas grid” doesn’t just mean you don’t burn gas. Under the scheme’s rules, the property must not be fuelled by mains gas, must have no current record of an existing gas meter point, must not be attached to a heat network, and must not be a new build.
The one that catches people is the meter point. A capped or clamped gas supply still counts as mains gas. If the property has an old gas connection that was capped off years ago and nothing has run on gas since, it will not qualify, even though the house is heated entirely by oil.
This is worth checking before you get anyone out to quote. If there’s a redundant gas supply anywhere on the property, or the house was on gas at some point in its history, find out whether the meter point record still exists. Your installer will discover it during the application and it’s better to know first.
What you’ll actually pay
A typical oil or LPG replacement tends to sit at the upper end of the range, because off-grid properties are usually older, larger and less well insulated than average.
| Property | Installed cost | After £9,000 |
|---|---|---|
| Rural three-bed, reasonable condition | £10,000-£13,500 | £1,000-£4,500 |
| Four-bed detached, older stock | £12,000-£16,500 | £3,000-£7,500 |
| Large or heritage property | £16,000-£22,000 | £7,000-£13,000 |
Compare that against replacing like for like. A new oil boiler runs £3,000 to £5,000 installed. So for a mid-range property the real gap between a new oil boiler and a heat pump is often two or three thousand pounds, not ten.
That’s a very different conversation to the one most people expect to be having.
Why the case is stronger off the gas grid
The numbers explain why the government has targeted the uplift where it has. What matters isn’t the headline price per litre, it’s the cost of a unit of actual delivered heat once boiler efficiency is accounted for.
| Fuel | Delivered heat cost |
|---|---|
| Mains gas | around 8.8p per kWh |
| Heating oil | 11.5p to 13.0p per kWh |
| Bulk LPG | 12.0p to 14.0p per kWh |
| Heat pump at COP 3.5 | around 7.5p per kWh |
| Heat pump at COP 4.0 | around 6.6p per kWh |
Heating oil figure based on the England average of 103.85p per litre excluding VAT as at 11 September 2026, adjusted for 5% VAT, an energy content of 10.35 kWh per litre and boiler efficiency of 85% to 90%. Oil and LPG are not covered by the Ofgem price cap, so your actual rate varies with delivery area, order volume and when you buy.
A heat pump running at a realistic seasonal efficiency of 3.5 to 4.0 delivers heat at roughly 6.6p to 7.5p per kWh. Against oil at 11.5p to 13p, that’s a saving of roughly 40% to 50% on the heating portion of your bill. Against LPG it’s slightly better again.
Compare that to the mains gas picture, where a heat pump at the same efficiency is roughly level with a gas boiler. Off the gas grid, the argument isn’t marginal. It’s the clearest case in UK domestic heating.
Two further points that don’t show up in the table:
Price volatility. Heating oil sits outside the Ofgem price cap entirely. In the past twelve months the England average has ranged from under 65p to over 135p per litre, and it rose more than 20% in the six weeks to September 2026 alone. Your heating budget moves with the oil market whether you like it or not. You’re also buying in bulk, which means taking a £700 or £1,000 hit in a single delivery rather than spreading the cost monthly.
The practical stuff. No deliveries to schedule, no tank to monitor in February, no running out. And you get the space the tank occupies back.
The honest caveat: a poorly designed heat pump in a poorly insulated rural property can still disappoint. The fuel economics are firmly in your favour off-grid, but they don’t rescue a bad installation. Insulation and system design still matter more than the badge on the outdoor unit.
The deadline is earlier than you think
This is the part that matters most and the part nobody explains.
The 31 March 2027 cut-off applies to the application, which your installer submits to Ofgem. It does not apply to the installation date. But the application follows a survey, a system design and a signed quotation, and none of that is instant.
Working backwards realistically:
- Finding and booking a survey: two to six weeks, longer in rural areas where MCS-certified installers are thinner on the ground
- Survey to full quotation: one to three weeks for a proper room-by-room heat loss calculation
- Deciding and signing: however long you take
- Application submitted: shortly after you commit
So if you want this grant, you want a surveyor booked by roughly January 2027 at the latest, and earlier is considerably safer. The last quarter before any grant deadline is always the busiest, and rural installer capacity is limited.
There’s a second risk worth knowing. Government grant pots can close early if the funding is exhausted before the end date. The scheme has a £400 million budget for 2026 to 2027, the largest annual allocation since it launched, but the uplift is deliberately time-limited and demand is the whole point of it.
How the money actually reaches you
You don’t apply and you never handle the grant.
Your MCS-certified installer applies to Ofgem on your behalf. The approved amount is deducted from the quotation and from the final invoice, so you only ever see and pay the reduced figure. It’s an upfront discount, not a rebate you claim back afterwards.
That has two practical consequences. You need an installer who is MCS certified, because without that there is no grant at all. And you should see the £9,000 itemised on the quotation before you sign anything, not mentioned vaguely as something that will be sorted later.
What to do now
- Check the gas meter point. If there’s any history of a mains gas connection at the property, establish whether a meter point record still exists before you go further
- Find MCS-certified installers covering your area. The MCS Find an Installer service lists them. Get three quotes, not one
- Check the consumer code. RECC or HIES membership is your recourse if something goes wrong
- Book the survey early. Aim for autumn 2026 rather than early 2027
- Check the quote shows the £9,000 explicitly, alongside a room-by-room heat loss calculation and an itemised radiator schedule
If you don’t qualify
If the property has a capped gas meter, or you’re on electric heating rather than oil or LPG, you’re not eligible for the uplift. You may still be eligible for the standard £7,500 BUS grant, which has no income test and no EPC requirement since April 2026.
Low income households in England should look at the Warm Homes Local Grant instead, which is administered by local authorities and can fund a much wider package of work.
Written by Ben Jardine. Ben is the editor of The Energy Upgrade and has been publishing online since 2014. He is not a heating engineer: this page sets out what the research and the official scheme rules actually say, and you should take advice from an MCS-certified installer before committing to an installation.