Warm Homes Fund 2026: What the New Consultation Means for Landlords

What's happened

On 27 March 2026, the government quietly opened a consultation that could reshape how landlords fund EPC improvements. The Warm Homes Fund — a £5 billion pot designed to accelerate energy efficiency upgrades across UK homes. The consultation is open until 1 June 2026 and is specifically exploring how public finance can help landlords, owner-occupiers, and social housing providers fund improvements like insulation, heat pumps, solar panels, and batteries.

This matters because it sits directly alongside the confirmed EPC C deadline for 2030. The government is building the funding infrastructure for the upgrades it's about to make mandatory.

What the Warm Homes Fund covers

The Warm Homes Fund is not a single grant scheme. It's the umbrella name for the government's entire approach to financing home energy upgrades. Under it sit several specific funding routes:

Warm Homes: Local Grant — delivered through local authorities, targeting low-income homeowners and private rented properties. Councils have some discretion over eligibility and delivery, which means availability varies by area. Private landlords can access funding, but after the first property there is a 50% co-funding requirement — the landlord must match half the cost for second and subsequent properties.

Boiler Upgrade Scheme (BUS) — up to £7,500 towards replacing fossil fuel heating with a heat pump. Extended to March 2028. Available to landlords provided the property has a valid EPC and is replacing gas, oil, or LPG heating. The grant is paid directly to your MCS-certified installer.

Consumer Loan Scheme — launching April 2027, this will provide £1.7 billion in low- or zero-interest loans for home energy improvements. The call for evidence is exploring whether to extend eligibility to private and social landlords, not just owner-occupiers. This would be a significant change — previous loan products have excluded the PRS.

ECO4 — the existing energy company obligation runs until December 2026. There is no ECO5. After ECO4 ends, the Warm Homes Plan replaces the supplier obligation model entirely with government-funded delivery.

Why landlords should pay attention now

Three things have changed that make this consultation different from previous government noise about energy efficiency:

The 2030 deadline is now confirmed policy. The Warm Homes Plan published on 21 January 2026 formally confirmed that all private rented properties must meet EPC Band C by 2030. The cost cap has been raised to £10,000 per property (up from £3,500 under the current MEES regulations). Fines for non-compliance are up to £30,000.

The funding is real and being structured. The £5 billion figure is not a manifesto promise — it's in the spending plans. The call for evidence is about how to deploy it, not whether to. For landlords, the key question is whether the Consumer Loan Scheme will be extended to the private rented sector. The law firm Travers Smith's analysis of the Warm Homes Plan confirms that the government is actively considering this.

The grant awareness gap is a real barrier. In the consultation document itself, the government acknowledges that landlords have low awareness of existing grants and that tenant-based eligibility rules make it difficult to access funding between tenancies. If you've tried to apply for ECO4 while a property was empty and been turned away, the government knows about the problem and is looking at solutions.

What this means for your compliance planning

If you're a landlord with properties below Band C, the practical takeaway is this: the funding landscape is shifting in your favour, but you need to know what you qualify for before you can use it.

Most landlords don't know which grants their properties are eligible for, what the cost of reaching Band C actually looks like for their specific building, or how to sequence improvements to get the most SAP points for the least money. The government's own consultation confirms this is the norm, not the exception.

Here's what to do:

Get a clear picture of each property's current position. Your EPC tells you your band and SAP score, but the generic recommendations on the certificate don't tell you what it will actually cost, which improvements to prioritise, or which grants apply to your situation.

Understand the 50% co-funding rule. Under Warm Homes: Local Grant, your first property can be fully funded (if eligible). Every property after that requires 50% landlord contribution. For a portfolio landlord, this makes it critical to know the exact cost per property so you can plan cash flow across multiple upgrades.

Track the consultation response. The call for evidence closes 1 June 2026. The government expects to publish details of the Consumer Loan Scheme — including landlord eligibility — in spring/summer 2026. If zero-interest loans become available for PRS properties, the economics of EPC compliance change dramatically.

Don't wait for 2029. The Warm Homes Plan includes a grandfathering provision: properties that achieve EPC Band C before October 2030 under the current SAP methodology are compliant for 10 years — even under the new Home Energy Model (HEM) expected in late 2027. Getting a Band C certificate now locks in a decade of compliance.

Improvements that currently qualify for funding

Not every upgrade is covered by every scheme. Here's a practical mapping:

The "sometimes" entries depend on your local authority's delivery partner and their current procurement arrangements. This is one of the most frustrating aspects of the current system — and exactly the kind of postcode lottery the Warm Homes Fund is trying to fix.

How EPCFix can help

Our remediation reports are designed for exactly this situation. Enter your postcode, select your property, and you get:

• Your current EPC data pulled from the government register in real time
• A costed improvement plan ranked by SAP points per pound, specific to your property type and region
• Grant eligibility flags showing which schemes your property is likely to qualify for, based on heating type, construction, and location
• Cost cap analysis showing how your total estimated spend compares to the £10,000 MEES cap
• A clear path to Band C with the cheapest combination of improvements that gets you over the line

At £49.99 per report, a single grant match can return 100 times the cost. A landlord who discovers they qualify for the £7,500 BUS grant saves more on that one finding than they'd spend on 150 reports.

Have your say

The consultation is open to everyone — including landlords, despite not being listed in the dropdown menu (select "member of the public"). If you want to shape how the Warm Homes Fund works for the private rented sector, respond before 1 June at energygovuk.citizenspace.com.

The NRLA has urged landlords to engage directly. As their chief executive put it, relying on the assumption that every landlord has unlimited reserves is not going to get tenants any closer to energy-efficient homes.

Check your property now