Air conditioning now qualifies for a £2,500 government grant

On 28 April 2026 the rules for the Boiler Upgrade Scheme changed, and air conditioning became eligible for public money for the first time.

An air-to-air heat pump, which is to say a reversible air conditioner, now carries a grant of £2,500. The scheme has been paying £7,500 towards air-to-water heat pumps for years and that continues. This is the addition, and it is aimed at exactly the machine this site spends most of its time on.

The definition is the whole thing

The regulations describe an air-to-air heat pump as plant that generates heat by a thermodynamic cycle, taking energy stored as heat in the air, and uses it to heat air for space heating.

Read that as a purchasing rule. If the machine heats, it is an air-to-air heat pump and the grant is in play. If it only cools, it is not one, and there is nothing to claim.

Anyone who has read the planning tool on this site will recognise the shape of that. Class G already refuses permitted development to a unit used solely for cooling, at any size, in any position. So the same single choice at the point of purchase now decides two separate things, and both of them come out the same way.

Buy the cooling-only box: planning application, no grant. Buy the reversible one: usually permitted development, and £2,500 off.

The unit database here holds eleven machines. Three are air-to-air heat pumps and all three are reversible. The other eight are portables and fans, which have no outdoor unit, sit outside Class G entirely, and are not eligible for anything.

The catch nobody mentions is MCS

This is the part worth reading twice, because it will cost people the grant.

The 2026 regulations define an installer as a person certified by the Microgeneration Certification Scheme, and they removed the reference to equivalent schemes that used to sit alongside it. MCS or nothing.

Now put that next to how the air conditioning trade is actually certified. A firm that fits split systems holds F-Gas certification, because that is what the law requires to handle refrigerant. F-Gas is a different scheme with a different purpose, run by different bodies, and it does not count here.

So there are three kinds of firm you might ring:

• F-Gas certified only. Perfectly legal to fit your unit. Cannot get you the grant.
• MCS certified only. Cannot lawfully touch the refrigerant circuit.
• Both. What you actually need.

Nothing on a company’s website makes this obvious, and a firm quoting you for an install has no particular reason to raise a scheme it cannot access. Ask directly, before the quote rather than after.

How the money moves

You do not apply and you do not receive anything. The scheme is installer led: your installer applies to Ofgem on your behalf, you confirm your consent within 14 days, and the grant comes off what you pay rather than arriving afterwards.

That has a practical consequence. Because the discount is applied by the installer, comparing two quotes means checking whether each one has the grant in it already. Two prices that look close may be £2,500 apart underneath.

What this does not do

It does not make the machine free, and it does not settle whether you should fit one at all. The grant is one payment against a purchase price and an electricity bill that runs for years afterwards, and this site takes the view that the second number is the one people underestimate.

It also carries the usual conditions: one grant per property, England and Wales only, new builds excluded apart from some self-builds, and minimum efficiency standards that the equipment has to meet.

What it changes about the advice

The recommendation on this site has been to buy the reversible unit rather than the cooling-only one, on the grounds that it usually costs about the same, it removes the planning problem, and it does something useful in winter.

That was already the right answer. It is now the right answer by £2,500, which is a large enough margin to be worth restating plainly: on a fixed installation in England or Wales, there is no longer a good reason to buy a cooling-only machine.

The grant amounts are on the government’s Boiler Upgrade Scheme page, and the change itself is SI 2026/390, which came into force on 28 April 2026 and extends to England and Wales.