Solar panel grants UK 2026: what actually exists, and what closed

A customer asks it in almost every solar sales conversation: is there a grant for this? In September 2026, the honest answer for a standalone home solar PV installation is no. The Great British Insulation Scheme closed in March. ECO4 is not built around solar and closes at the end of the year. The Boiler Upgrade Scheme funds heat pumps, not panels. What actually reduces the number on the quote is a tax relief and an export tariff, neither of which is a grant, and getting that distinction right in front of a customer is worth more than chasing a scheme that no longer exists.

This is written for the installer who has to answer that question with a straight face, not for the homeowner searching for it. Here is what actually exists, what closed, and what to say instead.

What actually exists for solar PV right now

Scheme	Status	Funds standalone solar PV?	What it actually covers
Great British Insulation Scheme (GBIS)	Closed 31 March 2026	No	Insulation measures, now closed
ECO4 scheme	Live, closes 31 December 2026	Not a general solar grant	Insulation and heating measures for low-income, fuel-poor households
Boiler Upgrade Scheme (BUS)	Live, no published end date	No	Air/ground source heat pumps, biomass boilers, air-to-air heat pumps
Smart Export Guarantee (SEG)	Live, no end date	Not a grant, an export tariff	Supplier-paid export payments for MCS-certified solar PV up to 5MW
0% VAT on installation	Live, expires 31 March 2027	Yes, as a tax relief, not a grant	Zero-rated VAT on installing (not supplying) PV panels and batteries
Home Energy Scotland Grant and Loan	Live, Scotland only	PV-T only, and as a loan, not a grant	Up to £5,000 loan for hybrid solar PV / water heating systems
Warm Homes Plan	Policy framework, announced March 2026	Not yet, no application route exists	£15bn programme; a Warm Homes Agency is still to be established

Each row is covered in detail below, with its source.

What is the ECO4 scheme, and why isn't it a solar grant

ECO4 is the fourth phase of the Energy Company Obligation: a requirement placed on energy suppliers, not a government fund, to deliver insulation and heating measures to low-income and fuel-poor households. It is insulation and heating led, and it is not a general solar grant^[1]. That single distinction is where most customer confusion starts. ECO4 is the scheme name people have heard, so it is the one they ask about, and they are usually asking whether it will pay for the thing they actually want, which is panels on the roof. It will not, and the sooner that is said the better.

When does ECO4 end, and will it be extended again

ECO4 closes on 31 December 2026. The original end date was 31 March 2026; the government's own consultation response confirms a nine-month extension, stated plainly: "We will extend the end date of ECO4 by 9 months, meaning ECO4 will end on 31 December 2026."^[1] The extension exists to give time for remediation of non-compliant installations and an orderly wind-down, not to keep the scheme running indefinitely.

On whether it gets extended again: the government's stated position is that there will be no comparable levy-funded successor to ECO4 delivered at arm's length. The intended replacement is public investment through the Warm Homes Plan, covered below^[9]. Treat 31 December 2026 as a hard close when you are setting a customer's expectations, not a date likely to move a second time.

What it takes to deliver ECO4 work, and why MCS is not enough

This is the part installers get wrong in the other direction. MCS is the accreditation that unlocks SEG and the devolved Scottish schemes, but it is not the one that unlocks ECO4. To deliver measures under ECO4, all installers must be a TrustMark registered business, with a narrow exception for district heating installers not connected to shared ground loops^[2]. TrustMark registration and MCS certification are separate things, and holding one does not give you the other.

On top of registration, ECO4 projects involving one or more measures referred to in PAS have to follow the domestic retrofit process required by PAS 2035^[2]. That is a whole-house approach, not a measure-by-measure one: a pre-retrofit assessment, and minimum SAP improvements (F and G rated properties up to band D, D and E rated properties up to band C). It is a materially different way of working from quoting a standalone PV system, and it is the reason ECO4 delivery tends to be a business-model decision rather than an add-on. Ofgem's supply chain guidance references PAS 2035:2019; confirm the current published version with TrustMark before you scope a project, because the standard has been revised since.

There is also a referral route worth knowing by name. ECO4 Flex is a household referral mechanism inside the wider ECO4 scheme that lets local authorities widen the eligibility criteria, aimed at households in fuel poverty or on a low income and vulnerable to the effects of a cold home who would not qualify under the standard benefits-based route^[3]. A local authority has to publish a Statement of Intent to take part, and the authority itself determines whether a household is eligible^[3]. If you work in an area with an active Statement of Intent, that is the route a customer who "doesn't qualify" may still come through, until the scheme closes on 31 December 2026.

The Great British Insulation Scheme has closed

GBIS ended as planned on 31 March 2026 and was not extended alongside ECO4^[1]. The two schemes ran side by side for years and were extended, or not, separately, which is why customers still raise GBIS months after it stopped taking measures. It is closed. Say so plainly, and do not let a customer plan around it.

The Boiler Upgrade Scheme doesn't fund solar panels

The Boiler Upgrade Scheme (BUS) is live, well-funded, and completely irrelevant to a solar-only quote, because solar PV is not an eligible technology under it^[4]. It pays:

• Air source heat pump: £7,500
• Ground source heat pump: £7,500
• Biomass boiler: £5,000
• Air-to-air heat pump: £2,500

An additional £1,500 is available for oil or LPG off-gas-grid properties, running until March 2027. GOV.UK does not publish an overall end date for BUS itself, only for that uplift, so do not quote a scheme end date beyond it^[4]. BUS is genuinely useful advice for a customer combining a heat pump with solar, but it is not a way to fund the panels themselves, and saying otherwise is the fastest way to lose a customer's trust once they check GOV.UK for themselves.

What actually cuts the cost today: 0% VAT on installation

This is the mechanism that is doing real work in 2026, and it is a tax relief, not a grant. The zero rate applies to the installation of energy-saving materials in residential accommodation, from 1 April 2022 to 31 March 2027, after which it reverts to the reduced rate of 5%^[7][8]. Solar panels are explicitly listed: "photovoltaic (PV) panels with cabling, control panel and AC/DC inverter." Batteries were added from 1 February 2024, covering retrofit to an existing microgeneration system, standalone grid-connected batteries, and hybrid systems^[7].

The detail installers get wrong most often: supply-only is not zero-rated. A customer buying panels without installation pays standard-rated VAT. The relief attaches specifically to the installation, which is exactly why the VAT line on a proposal has to reflect the actual scope of work, not a blanket assumption. This is also the point at which solar financing conversations tend to start, since the VAT treatment changes the net cost a customer is financing.

Smart Export Guarantee: an income stream, not a grant

SEG gets searched as if it were a grant. It isn't. It is an obligation on licensed electricity suppliers to offer an export tariff to small-scale generators, launched 1 January 2020, with no published end date^[5]. Suppliers set their own rates, so the return is shopped, not fixed by government.

What matters for a solar quote:

• Solar PV is eligible up to 5MW^[6].
• Installations up to 50kW need an MCS certificate, or an equivalent scheme such as Flexi-Orb, plus a meter capable of recording exported electricity^[6].
• The installation has to be in Great Britain.

The MCS requirement is where SEG eligibility and installer accreditation meet, and it is worth reading in full: our guide to how to become MCS certified covers the routes, costs and timeline, and already sets out correctly that the Boiler Upgrade Scheme funds heat pumps rather than solar, which is the same point made above. SEG functions as an export payment mechanism, conceptually adjacent to the net billing arrangements used in some other markets, though the UK runs its own supplier-priced version rather than a fixed net-metering rate.

Home Energy Scotland: the one place solar and funding share a sentence

Home Energy Scotland is devolved, and it should never be folded into a UK-wide list, because its rules are genuinely different north of the border^[10]. Clean heating measures (heat pump, heat network connection, biomass) get a grant of up to £7,500, plus an optional interest-free loan of up to £7,500. Energy efficiency measures get up to 75% of combined cost, with a maximum grant of £7,500 (solid wall insulation up to £7,500, flat roof or room-in-roof up to £3,000, loft, cavity or underfloor up to £1,500), plus a rural and island uplift of £1,500, taking the maximum available grant funding to £18,000.

Solar specifically: standalone solar PV is not funded. Only hybrid solar PV / water heating systems, solar PV-T, are covered, and only as a loan of up to £5,000, with no grant funding attached to it^[10]. The installer and product must be MCS certified, which is the same accreditation covered in our MCS certification guide. This is the one scheme where "solar" and "funding" genuinely appear in the same sentence, and it is still not a grant for the kind of standalone PV system most installers quote.

The Warm Homes Plan: the forward story, not a route to money today

The Warm Homes Plan was announced in March 2026 by DESNZ, backed by £15 billion across this Parliament: £4.4bn in direct grants for low-income households, £2.7bn for the Boiler Upgrade Scheme, £5bn for a new Warm Homes Fund covering consumer loans and sector investment, and £1.1bn for heat networks^[9]. It states an ambition to put solar panels on up to 3 million more homes by 2030, and a new Warm Homes Agency is planned to coordinate delivery, though no launch date has been given^[9].

This is the correct answer to give a customer who asks "what's coming", and the wrong answer to give one who asks "what can I apply for today." There is no application route yet, no confirmed start date beyond what is stated here, and no detail on how a homeowner would access it. Treat it as the policy direction the market is moving in, not as money on the table.

How solarVis helps you quote around what's actually funded

In solarVis's UK tariff and VAT engine, the VAT rate, inflation assumptions and export or compensation rate are all project-level numbers you set once and reuse, so a quote already reflects the current 0% installation rate or a shopped SEG figure without being rebuilt by hand for every customer. solarVis does not know ECO4, the Boiler Upgrade Scheme, SEG or the VAT relief by name, and it has no scheme database or eligibility engine to check a customer against any of them. What it holds is the tariff and pricing mechanics a partly funded job needs once you already know the number.

What a funded job needs	Where it sits in solarVis
A tariff and VAT rate reflecting exactly what the customer will pay	Tariff Settings, with VAT, inflation, and an export or compensation rate as generic numeric fields you set per project[11]
A funded amount, a BUS voucher, an ECO4 subsidy, the zero VAT rate, turned into an actual figure rather than a footnote	The Bill of Materials (BOM), with item- and project-level Discount, VAT and Profit Margin fields
Cost and payback that recompute once discounts and VAT are set	Financial outputs on the Summary: cost with and without VAT, payback period, annual, first-year and 20-year savings, and cumulative cash flow[12]
Evidence that the design behind the number holds up	An MCS Performance Estimate, MCS Shade Report and MCS structural report (built on Eurocode and UK DG489), generated as outputs for that specific proposal

Two things worth naming clearly. First, you enter the funded amount, whatever scheme produced it: solarVis does not fetch, validate or track ECO4 eligibility, a BUS voucher, an SEG rate, or VAT thresholds, and it has no connection to Ofgem's SEG register, TrustMark or PAS 2035 compliance checks. Second, the MCS Performance Estimate, Shade Report and structural report are outputs generated for a proposal, not proof of your company's own MCS certification status, which is a separate accreditation covered in the guide linked above. Once the solar proposal is built this way, the solar proposal generation workflow keeps the funded figure, the VAT treatment and the resulting payback period consistent every time you reopen the design, rather than each revision starting from a blank spreadsheet.