Warm Homes: Local Grant for tenants and landlords

If you rent privately

The Warm Homes: Local Grant does include the private rented sector, and this is one of the few funded schemes where a tenant is the one who qualifies. The council assesses your household — your benefits, your income, or your postcode — against the same three pathways any owner-occupier uses.

What you need to know, in order of how likely it is to stop you:

1. Your landlord has to agree

The work is done to somebody else’s property, so it cannot proceed without them. The guidance requires the landlord to complete a landlord declaration form and return it to the council, and requires the council to verify that the landlord’s details match the title deeds before the property can go forward. Start the conversation with your landlord or letting agent early — before you get emotionally invested in a new heating system.

2. Your EPC band has to be D or worse — and F/G has an extra rule

As everywhere in this scheme, the home must be EPC D, E, F or G; bands A to C are ineligible in all circumstances. But privately rented homes rated F or G face an additional condition: they must have a registered exemption under the Energy Efficiency (Private Rented Property) (England and Wales) Regulations 2015 — the rules usually called MEES.

The logic is straightforward once you see it. Those regulations already set a minimum standard for letting a property. Grant money cannot be used to bring a property up to a standard the law already demands of the landlord — but it can be used to improve a property beyond the minimum legal requirement. So an F or G rental is only in scope where the landlord holds a properly registered exemption, and the guidance tells councils to check that landlords letting F or G properties are compliant with those regulations.

3. You will not be asked to pay

The guidance is unambiguous: tenants are not required or expected to make any contribution to the cost of upgrades. Any cost contribution that arises is the landlord’s, not yours. If anyone asks a tenant for money to unlock this scheme, that is a red flag — stop and go back to your council.

If you are a landlord

The scheme treats landlords generously the first time and much less generously afterwards. The rules, as published:

• One property fully funded. A landlord with an eligible low-income tenant in an eligible property can have one home upgraded at no cost to them across the whole scheme.
• 50% from the second property onwards. Every subsequent property in the portfolio requires a 50% landlord cost contribution towards the total cost of works. The guidance spells out the effect: the maximum subsidy for the second home and beyond is half what an owner-occupier receives.
• No portfolio-size bar. Unlike phase 2 of the Home Upgrade Grant, there is no eligibility restriction based on how many properties a landlord owns. You may upgrade as many eligible properties as you like, subject to the contribution and the subsidy limit below.
• Tracked centrally by title deeds. DESNZ maintains a central database of landlords supported by the scheme so that no landlord receives a second fully funded upgrade. Councils must not confirm a fully funded offer until DESNZ or its delivery partner has confirmed the landlord has not already had one through another project — which is why offers to landlords can take longer than offers to owner-occupiers.
• Subsidy control applies. Upgrades to rented property count as a subsidy to the landlord under the Subsidy Control Act 2022. Councils must ensure the landlord stays within the Minimal Financial Assistance limit of £315,000, counting all public subsidy across the current and previous two financial years, and landlords are asked to confirm this in writing. Above £100,000 of total subsidy, transparency requirements under the Act also bite.
• A rent declaration. The landlord declaration form requires landlords to confirm they do not intend to raise rents as a direct result of the scheme-funded upgrades, and to acknowledge that they may be surveyed as part of DESNZ’s evaluation.

Charity-owned rentals follow the same private-rented rules — one property fully funded, 50% thereafter — but must identify as private rented rather than social housing, and are excluded where the charity is a Registered Provider of social housing.

If you rent from a council or housing association

Social housing is not what this grant is for. The scheme funds privately owned and privately rented homes.

There is one narrow exception, and it is not a route a tenant can use. Social housing may be treated with Warm Homes: Local Grant funding only for “infill” purposes — where an area-based project is upgrading a block of flats or a run of adjacent terraces and leaving one property out would undermine the whole job, for example by preventing external wall insulation across a connected row. Even then, social housing must not exceed 10% of the homes upgraded in a project, clear justification has to be recorded, and the social landlord must contribute at least 50% of the cost. The homes must be physically connected, not simply in the same street or community.

If you rent socially, the right route is your landlord. Councils and housing associations upgrade their own stock through the Warm Homes: Social Housing Fund and its predecessor the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund. Ask your landlord which programme your block is in and where it sits in their retrofit plan.

Park homes

Park homes are eligible for the Warm Homes: Local Grant, which is not true of every scheme, and the guidance sets three conditions:

• the park home is the household’s permanent residence;
• it is equivalent to an EPC band D–G home — park homes do not usually have an EPC, so they are assessed to produce an Energy Performance Rating that can evidence equivalence;
• it is expected to still exist (not be demolished) for the whole duration of the guarantee period for the measures installed, or the longest guarantee period where several measures are fitted.

Park home insulation appears explicitly on the scheme’s list of eligible energy-performance measures. See park home grants and park home insulation for the detail.

What actually gets installed, and who pays

The package is decided by a retrofit assessment rather than picked from a menu. Funding sits under two separate caps — an energy-performance cap covering fabric and smart measures (insulation, draughtproofing, glazing, doors, heating controls, solar PV, domestic batteries) and a low-carbon-heat cap covering heat pumps and high heat retention storage heaters. Both are set at £16,600, but they are project averages a council must hit across all the homes it upgrades, not an entitlement per property. Nobody is promised a specific amount.

Next step

Tenants: check which pathway fits your household — benefits, income or postcode — then speak to your landlord before applying through the GOV.UK service. Landlords: confirm the tenant’s eligibility and the property’s EPC band first, then contact the council directly; the declaration form comes from them. Our step-by-step application guide covers the whole journey, and the eligibility checker compares this scheme against ECO4 and the Boiler Upgrade Scheme.

Common questions about tenants and landlords