Is there a government grant for air conditioning? Until April 2026 the answer was a straightforward no. It is no longer a straightforward no — but it is also not the yes that some advertising now implies. There is a £2,500 government grant attached to the machine most people call air conditioning, it is written into law, and as of October 2026 no household in England or Wales has been able to claim it. Here is what the grant funds, why the route to it is not open, and which schemes genuinely apply to a cooling project today.
The grant is real, and it is £2,500
The Boiler Upgrade Scheme is the principal government grant for low-carbon heating in England and Wales. For its first four years it covered air-to-water, ground and water source heat pumps and biomass boilers. It now also covers air-to-air heat pumps — the formal name for a split or multi-split air conditioning system that can heat a room as well as cool it.
The change was made by the Boiler Upgrade Scheme (England and Wales) (Amendment) Regulations 2026, which came into force on 28 April 2026, following a Department for Energy Security and Net Zero announcement in November 2025. Ofgem, which administers the scheme, publishes the air-to-air figure as £2,500 off the cost and installation and restricts it to residential properties. The amending regulations are blunt about that restriction: an air-to-air heat pump is not eligible plant where the building is non-residential. A shop, an office or a salon cannot use it, however domestic the building looks.
It is a heating grant, and there is no grant for cooling
This is the part most summaries skip. The regulations define an air-to-air heat pump by what it does: plant that moves heat already stored in the air and uses that energy to heat air for the purposes of space heating. Cooling does not appear in the definition at all.
MCS, which writes the installation standards the scheme relies on, is equally direct. Its consumer guidance notes that while most of these products can also provide cooling on hot days, they must not be optimised for cooling, and systems that only provide cooling are excluded.
So the test is not what the box is called. A machine sold as air conditioning that is specified, sized and commissioned to heat a space can in principle sit inside the scheme. A machine specified purely to cool cannot, and no amount of paperwork will change that. If the reason you want air conditioning is July and August rather than January, the Boiler Upgrade Scheme is not funding your project.
Why nobody has claimed it yet
The regulations only pay out on work done by an installer certified by the Microgeneration Certification Scheme. That is a hard requirement rather than a preference: MCS certification sits inside the statutory definition of an installer.
MCS has not yet opened air-to-air certification. Its consumer page says, in plain words, that at the moment no installers are yet certified to install air-to-air heat pumps. Its implementation update of 28 April 2026 — the same day the regulations took effect — explains why. The product and installation standards have been published, but the Installer Operating Requirements and Conformity Assessment Guidelines were still going through approval, after which individual certification bodies must each gain UKAS accreditation before they can certify anyone at all. MCS gives no completion date, noting only that timescales vary with each certification body's readiness and UKAS resources.
A competence gate waits at the end of that process. The Technical Supervisor on an air-to-air installation will need competence in Refrigeration, Air Conditioning and Heat Pumps at Level 3 or above — a refrigeration qualification, not a wet-heating one.
The honest position in October 2026, then, is this: the money is real, the legal framework is finished, and the delivery route is not open. Anyone quoting you today on the strength of a £2,500 grant is quoting against something nobody can yet redeem.
How £2,500 compares with the rest of the scheme
Context helps: £2,500 is the smallest grant in the scheme by a wide margin. Ofgem's published figures are £7,500 towards an air-to-water, ground source or water source heat pump; £9,000 where the property is off the gas grid and replacing oil or LPG, a figure available until 31 March 2027; £5,000 towards a biomass boiler; and £2,500 towards an air-to-air heat pump in a residential property.
The gap is deliberate. The scheme was built to take fossil-fuel boilers out of homes, and an air-to-water heat pump replacing a gas boiler does that comprehensively, usually including hot water. An air-to-air system heats the air in the rooms it serves and nothing else.
What the scheme asks of the property
Two conditions are worth knowing. First, you must be replacing an existing heating system; the gov.uk guidance describes the qualifying systems as oil, gas, electric or LPG, which brings storage heaters into scope rather than excluding them. Second, the energy performance certificate requirement has gone — the 2026 amendment removed the rule that a property needed a valid EPC. The scheme covers England and Wales only, and the installation must be commissioned within 120 days of the voucher being issued.
What does apply today: the VAT position
The relief actually available on a cooling project is a VAT one, and it is not a grant: no application, no voucher, no scheme membership. The rate is applied on the invoice by whoever makes the supply, or it is not.
Installations of energy-saving materials in residential accommodation in Great Britain are zero-rated under the rules in HMRC's VAT Notice 708/6. That zero rate runs to 31 March 2027, and from 1 April 2027 these supplies revert to the reduced rate of 5%. HMRC's stated understanding is that most air conditioning units are air source heat pumps, which is what brings the technology within reach of the relief at all, although HMRC adds that borderline cases turn on the facts of each case.
The conditions are narrower than most advertising suggests. The supply has to include installation, because materials supplied without installation are standard-rated, and servicing and repair sit outside the relief altogether. We have set out the four conditions and the exclusions that catch most invoices in our guide to what the zero VAT rate actually covers on air conditioning. For the practical side alongside the tax side, our air conditioning installation service across West Yorkshire page covers how a fixed system is specified and what the electrical work involves.
ECO4, and the schemes that do not reach air conditioning
Worth closing the other doors explicitly. ECO4, the Energy Company Obligation, is a supplier-funded obligation aimed at low-income and fuel-poor households, gated on qualifying benefits plus an EPC in bands D to G for owner-occupiers or E to G for private renters. The government extended it by nine months to 31 December 2026 and confirmed there will be no successor obligation for work to carry over into. The measures gov.uk describes are insulation and boiler replacement, repair or other heating upgrades; cooling is not among them. The Great British Insulation Scheme closed as planned on 31 March 2026.
There is no second route, in other words. The £2,500 Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant is the only government money attached to an air-to-air system, it is for heating, and it is not yet claimable.
Where that leaves a Yorkshire household
If you want cooling next summer, price the job on its own merits, with the zero VAT rate where the work qualifies and no grant assumed. If what you actually want is heating, look at air-to-water first, where the grant is three times larger. And if a quote leans on the £2,500 figure, one question settles it: are you MCS certified for air-to-air today, and can I see you on the Find an Installer tool?
Premier Electrical Renewables is F-Gas registered with REFCOM, the registration a business needs in order to handle refrigerant in a fixed system lawfully, and one you can check yourself on REFCOM's public register. Our accreditations page lists what we hold, and our air conditioning installation page sets out how we approach a fixed system, from heat gain calculation to the circuit it runs on. We would rather tell you a grant does not apply than quote against one that does not exist.