We took a £14,000 heat pump quote apart, line by line

Findings

1. 01

   The heat pump itself is about a third of the bill, not most of it

   A 7 kilowatt air-source heat pump from a Tier 1 manufacturer runs somewhere between £3,200 and £4,200 at trade in 2026, on top of which the installer adds a margin. In our worked quote the unit sits at £4,400, which is unremarkable and comparable to what installer directories publish for the same output class. Households often expect this line to dominate the total; in almost every quote we have seen, it does not. The two lines that dominate are what surrounds the unit rather than the unit itself.

   Heat pump unit£4,400
2. 02

   Radiator upgrades are where the money quietly goes

   A heat pump runs efficiently at a flow temperature of forty-five degrees or lower, and most existing radiators in a British home were sized for a gas boiler running at seventy. Bringing a set of eight or nine radiators up to a size that will still heat each room at the lower flow temperature is where a heat pump installation earns or loses its efficiency, and it is where a quote earns or loses its integrity. Our worked example prices this line at £2,800, comprising £180 to £220 per replaced radiator across seven rooms plus labour, which matches what installers on the MCS register publish. If a quote does not name the radiators being replaced and their new outputs, the household is being asked to trust a number rather than a plan.

   Radiator upgrades, seven rooms£2,800
3. 03

   The cylinder is the second big line, and it is usually mandatory

   Almost every existing British hot-water cylinder is sized and coiled for a boiler; a heat pump needs a cylinder with a longer coil so it can transfer heat at a lower temperature without stalling. Our worked example prices a 200-litre unvented heat-pump cylinder at £1,650 supplied and fitted, which is at the middle of the published range. This is genuinely necessary work for most homes and it is not padding. What is worth pushing back on is whether the cylinder size is right; a household of two people does not need a 300-litre tank because it fits in the same cupboard.

   Cylinder, supplied and fitted£1,650
4. 04

   The heat-loss survey and design are cheap and load-bearing

   A room-by-room heat-loss survey and an accompanying system design should account for around six to eight hundred pounds of the total. In our worked example we allow £700. That figure looks small next to the radiators, but it is the line that decides whether the radiators and the cylinder and the flow temperature are correct in the first place. A quote that omits this line, or bundles it invisibly into 'design and installation', is a quote asking the household to skip the piece of work that makes everything else work.

5. 05

   Labour, controls and commissioning make up the balance

   The remaining £4,450 in our worked quote covers three to four days of labour for two engineers, the smart controls package, the electrical works, the MCS paperwork required for the grant, and commissioning. That total sits within the published range in the DESNZ dataset and is where installer margin lives. It is the least interesting line for the household to negotiate on, because a competent installer earns their margin here; it is the most important line to walk away from if the paperwork line is not present, since without MCS commissioning the £7,500 grant is not payable.

   Labour, controls, commissioning, MCS£4,450
6. 06

   The net cost is the number worth quoting to a neighbour

   Fourteen thousand pounds before the grant becomes six and a half thousand pounds after it, which is the number that matters to the household making the decision. That is roughly the price of a mid-range replacement gas boiler with a full system flush and a smart control package, and it is materially less than the price a decade ago. It is also very close to the median net cost DESNZ observed across the 742-home Electrification of Heat sample once the grant was applied. The word 'expensive' is doing less honest work in these conversations than it did five years ago.

   Net cost after grant£6,500

Headline figures

• Headline quote total, before grant£14,000modelled
• Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant, England and Wales£7,500reported
• Net cost to the household£6,500modelled
• Median installed cost, DESNZ EoH dataset£12,900measured

Measured is monitored data from a real project. Reported is a publisher's stated figure. Modelled is our own estimate, worked from public references.

What this investigation cannot tell you

• This piece cannot tell a household whether their specific home suits a heat pump; that is what the heat-loss survey is for.
• The worked quote assumes standard pipework routing and a serviceable existing radiator layout; both change the total materially.
• Regional labour rates in London and the South East run around fifteen per cent higher than our worked example; rural Scotland is broadly similar to the figure shown.
• The £7,500 grant applies in England and Wales; Scotland's Home Energy Scotland offer is structured differently and the net cost calculation changes with it.

Where the figures come from

• Electrification of Heat demonstration project, final reportDepartment for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ)
• Heat pump market snapshot 2024Nesta
• MCS certified installer directory and installation standardsMicrogeneration Certification Scheme
• Boiler Upgrade Scheme guidancegov.uk

How we built this

We took the DESNZ Electrification of Heat median installed cost as our anchor, sourced typical unit prices from three MCS-certified installer price lists published in 2025 and 2026, and cross-referenced radiator and cylinder line items against the Nesta market review. Where a figure is our own estimate rather than a published one, it sits at the middle of a published range and is labelled 'modelled' in the metrics table. No specific installer is named and no household is described; this is a worked example, not a report on any one project.