Is there a government grant for air conditioning in the UK?

Most people searching for an air conditioning grant have found the government’s Boiler Upgrade Scheme, which offers £7,500 towards a heat pump in England and Wales. It’s a genuinely good scheme, but it’s worth being clear about what it covers before you factor it into your budget, because for most home air conditioning installations, the honest answer is that it doesn’t apply.

Why the grant usually doesn’t cover home air conditioning

The Boiler Upgrade Scheme is designed to replace a fossil-fuel boiler with a heat pump that provides your whole home’s central heating and hot water, typically through an air-to-water system connected to radiators or underfloor heating and a hot water cylinder, replacing your existing boiler entirely.

The wall-mounted or multi-split systems most homes install for cooling (including everything we fit) are air-to-air systems: they heat and cool the air directly in the room they’re installed in, and they don’t touch your boiler, radiators, or hot water. Air-to-air systems are explicitly excluded from the Boiler Upgrade Scheme in England and Wales, regardless of how efficient they are or that they’re technically heat pumps.

We’d rather tell you that plainly upfront than let a search result imply otherwise and have it come up as a surprise later.

What this means in practice

If you’re looking to replace cooling in one or two rooms, or add heating and cooling to a home office, extension, or loft conversion (the kind of installation most of our customers want), there currently isn’t a national grant that applies, and any fixed price you get from us won’t include one.

If you’re instead looking to replace your whole boiler and central heating system with a heat pump, that’s a different, larger project, a full air-to-water installation, which may qualify for the £7,500 grant through an MCS-certified installer of that specific type of system. It’s not something we currently install, so if that’s what you need, an MCS-registered heat pump installer is the right place to start.

What’s actually worth checking instead

A few UK energy suppliers occasionally run their own smaller incentives or interest-free finance offers on air conditioning and heat pump products, separate from the government scheme, and these change often enough that they’re worth a quick search closer to the time you’re ready to book. We’ll always tell you plainly if a genuine discount or finance option is available when you get your quote, not badge our standard pricing as a “grant” to make it sound bigger than it is.