Warm Homes: Local Grant in 2026 — Two £16,600 Cost Caps, Not One £30,000 Figure

The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero updated the Warm Homes: Local Grant policy guidance on 2 July 2026, and one of the stated changes was to increase the scheme cost caps. The new figures are worth knowing, but the structure matters more than the increase — because the way the caps are set is not the way the scheme is usually described.

What the guidance says

From the July 2026 policy guidance, in full:

Cost Caps £16,600 per home for energy performance upgrades. £16,600 per home for low carbon heating. Cost caps can be averaged across a project and must be met by project closure.

Three things follow from that, and each one changes how the scheme should be read.

They are two caps, not one pot. A measure is funded against the cap it belongs to. Insulation, glazing and ventilation draw on the energy performance cap; a heat pump draws on the low carbon heating one. A household needing a great deal of one and very little of the other cannot simply move the headroom across.

They are limits on spend, not an entitlement. Nobody is owed £16,600, let alone twice. The support is whatever the property needs to reach the local authority’s target band, and most whole-home packages land well below the ceiling.

They are averaged across a project. This is the part most easily missed. The requirement is that a council meets the caps across its project by closure — not on every individual home. One property can sit above a cap if others sit below it. That is a meaningful difference for anyone with an unusually expensive property, and it is a conversation to have with the delivery partner rather than an assumption to make.

The figure usually attached to the Warm Homes Plan is a single per-property maximum. The guidance does not describe one.

Who qualifies

Eligibility runs on three pathways, and a household needs to satisfy one of them:

1. Location. The household lives in a postcode within Indices of Multiple Deprivation Income Deciles 1–2. The eligible postcode list is published on GOV.UK alongside the guidance and was updated in the July revision.
2. Benefits. The household receives a specified means-tested benefit, or qualifies via route 2 of ECO Flex. The list is closed and limited to: Housing Benefit, income-based Jobseeker’s Allowance, income-related Employment and Support Allowance, Income Support, Pension Credit (savings and guarantee), and Universal Credit.
3. Income. Annual gross household income below £36,000, or below the “after housing costs” threshold in the published equivalisation tables, which vary with household composition.

That third route is the one most people do not know exists. A household above the benefits line, in an ordinary postcode, can still qualify on income alone — and the after-housing-costs route can bring in households above £36,000 gross where housing costs are high.

The property has to qualify too

Household eligibility is only half of it.

EPC band D to G only. Properties rated A to C are ineligible in all circumstances — there is no discretion in that. Park homes do not have EPCs but must be assessed as equivalent to band D–G.

Existing dwellings only. New build and self-build homes that have never been occupied are ineligible.

Owner-occupier and private rented both count. Social housing is ineligible except for in-fill, which requires a 50% contribution from the landlord. A 10% cap on the share of a project’s homes is widely quoted for this, including in an earlier version of this article. Energy Pages could not source it from the scheme guidance and will not repeat it as fact.

Any fuel type, on or off the gas grid. Councils were asked to set a non-binding target for off-gas-grid homes, which is a separate matter from eligibility.

What it costs the household: nothing

This is the clearest statement in the guidance and the one most worth quoting:

Owner occupiers are not required or expected to make any contributions to the cost of upgrades. This is to protect the household from being forced to make a cost contribution.

Tenants are not expected to contribute either. A household that wants to fund extra work the retrofit coordinator has not recommended — cosmetic finishing, say — may generally do so, but that is a choice rather than a condition of the grant.

Landlords are treated differently, and the rule is specific. A private rented sector landlord may have one home fully funded. Any additional homes after the first require a 50% contribution from the landlord. That is a detail worth knowing before a landlord with a portfolio builds a plan around the scheme.

What to do with this

If the property is band D–G and the household fits one of the three pathways, the route in is the government’s own service at gov.uk/apply-warm-homes-local-grant, which checks the address and passes the household to the right council; the council or its delivery partner — often a managing agent or energy company — then runs the survey and the work. An earlier version of this sentence said there was no national portal, which was wrong. Eligibility is determined locally within these national parameters, so two households on the same street can get different answers.

The Warm Homes Plan guide sets out the four-route structure and the application walkthrough. If the property is off the gas grid on oil or LPG, check the Boiler Upgrade Scheme separately — it runs a temporary uplift of its own that has nothing to do with these caps and a different deadline.

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Figures and quotations taken from “Warm Homes: Local Grant — policy guidance (updated July 2026)”, published by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero on GOV.UK, read on 13 August 2026. Scheme rules change and delivery is locally determined — confirm the current position with your local authority before making a decision. Energy Pages is an independent information service, not a government body, a delivery agent or an installer.