The Boiler Upgrade Scheme Just Had Its Biggest Month Ever. The £9,000 Oil Grant Is Nearly All of the Jump.
July was a record: 8,150 applications, 81% up on June. Most coverage stopped there. The government's own statistics show 3,037 of those applications came through the £9,000 off-gas-grid route that opened in July, which is 37% of the month and very close to the whole of the increase.
By Energy Pages
The Boiler Upgrade Scheme took 8,150 applications in July 2026. That is the most in any month since the scheme opened in May 2022, and the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero announced it on 27 August as a record for households heating with oil.
The underlying statistics, published the same day, say something more specific than the press release does. The £9,000 route for off-gas-grid homes opened in July. It took 3,037 applications in its first month. That is 37% of everything the scheme received.
What the numbers look like with the new route taken out
June’s total was 4,512 applications. July’s was 8,150. The increase is 3,638.
Take the 3,037 applications on the £9,000 route out of July and 5,113 are left. Against June’s 4,512, that is a rise of about 13% on the underlying scheme — a good month, in line with the direction of the last year, and nothing like a record.
So the record is the uplift. Not partly, not mostly: the new grant accounts for 3,037 of a 3,638 rise, and the rest of the scheme carried on doing roughly what it was already doing.
That is worth being precise about in both directions. It does not mean the interest is soft. It means a specific policy aimed at a specific group of households produced a response from that group almost immediately, in the first month it was possible to apply. Whether that response holds for a second and third month is the thing to watch in the August and September releases.
The other headline figures
The two comparisons in the press release both hold at source. July’s 8,150 is 81% above June’s 4,512, and 112% above the 3,853 recorded in July 2025.
Beyond the monthly figures, the release gives the shape of the scheme after four years:
| Since May 2022 | |
|---|---|
| Voucher applications received | 143,650 |
| Vouchers issued | 119,418 |
| Redemptions paid | 90,115 |
Of the 90,115 installations actually paid for, 56% replaced a gas system, 17% replaced oil, and 13% went into properties that had no heating system at all. Rural and urban properties are almost evenly split, 49% to 51%, and 38% of grants went to homes off the gas grid.
That 17% is the number the £9,000 uplift is aimed at moving, and it is a cumulative figure covering four years of a scheme that only started paying oil households more in July. It will take several months of releases before it shifts at all.
What an oil or LPG household actually pays
The median reported cost of an air-to-water heat pump installed between April and June 2026 was £12,908, and that figure includes the grant rather than sitting on top of it. An off-gas-grid household claiming the full £9,000 against a median-priced installation is therefore looking at something under £4,000 of its own money.
Two cautions on that sum. The median covers every air-to-water installation on the scheme, not only the off-gas-grid ones, and larger rural properties tend to need larger and more expensive systems. And a median is not a quote. The number is useful for knowing whether a quote is in the right postcode, not for budgeting.
The direction of travel on price is the more durable point. Adjusted for inflation, the median cost of an air-to-water heat pump in the second quarter of 2026 was 11% below the same quarter in 2023, the scheme’s first full year.
The deadline is the part that matters now
The £9,000 rate runs until March 2027. Applications to the scheme itself run to 31 December 2029 — extended from 31 December 2027 by S.I. 2026/390, in force 28 April 2026, and Energy Pages set out the difference in August’s piece on the uplift: the deadline is on the extra £1,500, not on the grant.
July’s figures change how that deadline should be read. The constraint on an installation is not the paperwork but the installer’s diary, and a route that took 3,037 applications in its first month is putting demand on that diary. One of the households the department quoted in its own release, replacing an oil boiler in Wales, said the installation date was three weeks away and that she had expected to wait months. That is one household’s experience in the first weeks of the route, not a published average, and it is worth reading as a floor rather than a promise.
The application is made by the installer, not the householder. Finding an MCS-certified installer who will quote is the step that has to happen first, and it is the step with a queue behind it.
One thing the figures rule out
Air-to-air heat pumps — the type that heats through vents rather than radiators, and is often sold as air conditioning that works both ways — appear in the statistics as a column of zeros. Not a small number: zero applications, zero vouchers, zero redemptions, in every month since the scheme opened.
MCS explained why in an update on 8 September. The accreditation service UKAS has approved the changes needed to bring air-to-air into the MCS installer scheme, which is the step before certification bodies can offer it. Two bodies, NAPIT and Certsure, have said they intend to apply. MCS says the timeline for their accreditation is outside its control and has not given a date.
Until that finishes, no installer can be MCS-certified for air-to-air, and the Boiler Upgrade Scheme requires an MCS-certified installation. Anyone quoted for an air-to-air system on the basis that the grant will cover it should ask to see the installer’s certification for that technology before signing anything.
Where this applies
The Boiler Upgrade Scheme is England and Wales only. Scotland runs its own grant and loan package through Home Energy Scotland, and Northern Ireland has separate schemes, both of which the grants section covers.
Read at source, 10 September 2026: the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero press release of 27 August 2026, “Record number of heating oil households apply for a heat pump” (the 8,150 figure, the 81% and 112% comparisons, the rural and off-gas-grid proportions, the March 2027 deadline, the 200,000 leaflets in June, and the household accounts of installation lead times); and Boiler Upgrade Scheme Statistics: July 2026, published the same day, read from the release’s own spreadsheet (the monthly series in table M1.1, the 3,037 applications on the £9,000 route and the cumulative totals in the commentary, the fuel-type and gas-grid splits in tables 1.3 and 1.6, and the quarterly cost medians in tables Q1.1A and Q1.1B). The air-to-air position is MCS’s own update of 8 September 2026, “Implementation of air-to-air heat pumps into MCS enters next phase”. The arithmetic separating the standard route from the £9,000 route is Energy Pages’ subtraction on the department’s published figures and is shown in full above. Energy Pages is an independent information service, not a government body, a supplier or an installer.