Short answer: no. A valid EPC stopped being a requirement for the Boiler Upgrade Scheme on 28 April 2026, under SI 2026/390.
Long answer: almost nobody has noticed. Homeowners have not noticed, because the last thing they read about it was written before the change. And a great many installer websites still say the old thing, in good faith, because nobody went back and edited a page that was correct when it was written.
What the old rule actually did
Under the previous rules an applicant needed a valid EPC, and any outstanding loft or cavity wall insulation recommendations on it had to be dealt with first. In practice that produced two dead ends.
- No certificate at all. A large share of homes in England and Wales have never had one, or had one that has since expired. Every one of those households was told to go and get an assessment before anything could happen.
- A certificate with recommendations on it. Loft and cavity work first, grant afterwards. For a lot of people that was the moment the project quietly died.
Both of those dead ends are gone. Those households are eligible now.
Why this matters commercially, not just administratively
Rule changes usually move a figure. This one moved the boundary of who can be sold to, which is a different kind of change.
Every homeowner who ever rang an installer and was told “you will need an EPC first, and you will probably need the loft done” is a person who stopped. They did not buy a heat pump from somebody else. They just stopped. That is a list of warm, already-interested households sitting in the past of every installer in the country, and the thing that stopped them is no longer true.
Nobody has to be persuaded here. They have to be told the answer changed.
What is still true
Enough of this industry overclaims, so here is the line clearly. The scheme is England and Wales only — Scotland and Northern Ireland run their own. It is worth £7,500 on an air source or ground source heat pump, and £9,000 where the property is off the gas grid and heated by oil or LPG. Both figures are indicative; the binding one is the one on the application. The scheme runs to 2030, so it is a standing reason to call you rather than a closing window.
And insulation has not become irrelevant. It is no longer a grant condition, which is not the same as saying it does not matter to how the system performs. That is a survey conversation, and it is a much better one to have on your terms at the kitchen table than as a reason the website turned somebody away.
Go and read your own grant page
This is a ten-minute job with a real return. Look for anything that says an EPC is required, anything that tells homeowners to sort their insulation first, and anything that still describes the scheme as ending in 2028. Each of those is turning away households who qualify, and it makes you look out of date to the ones who already know it changed.
Then go a step further, because “grants available — contact us” is its own dead end. It asks a hesitant person to ring a stranger before they know whether it is worth it, and most of them will not. Our post on how the £7,500 grant works in 2026 covers the rest of the rules in plain English.
What a checker does with a rule change
GrantCheck is built against the current rules rather than a PDF from last year, so a property with no certificate is not turned away by a tool wearing your logo. It takes a postcode, resolves the property, asks only the two or three questions that change the answer, and returns an indicative figure in about thirty seconds. Then the enquiry lands with you, with the property details and the figure the homeowner was shown.
The part that matters when rules move: it is changed in one place and every customer’s checker is correct the same day. An eligibility tool that is quietly six months out of date is worse than no tool at all, because it is confidently wrong in your name.
It also knows “no” from “do not know”. Missing information is never treated as a yes, which is the difference between a warm enquiry and a wasted Saturday morning.
See what this looks like for heat pump installers, or book fifteen minutes and we will run it against a real address on your patch.
Grant figures on this page were checked against gov.uk on 30 August 2026 and are indicative — the binding figure is the one from the official application. Spotted something out of date? Tell us and we will fix it.