Affordable Warmth Scheme NI (2026/27): What It Pays For, Who Qualifies, How to Apply

The short version, checked on 6 September 2026

I run a solar quote comparison site, and this is the page I point more people at than any other. Everything below was checked against the Housing Executive and nidirect pages on 6 September 2026. Most of what ranks for this query is out of date, so it is worth being specific.

Question	Answer as of 6 September 2026
Is it open?	Yes. Business case approval runs to March 2028.
Who runs it?	Funded by the Department for Communities, delivered solely by the Housing Executive.
Income limit	Total gross annual household income under £23,000.
Maximum grant	£7,500, or £10,000 where solid wall insulation is needed.
What you pay	Nothing, if the work stays inside the approved grant.
Who can apply	Owner-occupiers, people with a life interest, and private tenants.
Who cannot	Housing Executive and housing association tenants.
Does it fund solar?	No. Never has.
How to start	NI Energy Advice, 0800 111 4455.

Four things you will read elsewhere that are wrong. The income limit is not £20,000, it has been £23,000 since 2023. The scheme did not end in March 2026. It is not part of ECO4, which is a Great Britain obligation on suppliers. And the Warm Homes Plan is not an NI scheme: it is a Great Britain programme, energy efficiency policy is devolved here, and it has replaced nothing. NI’s own Warm Homes Scheme closed on 31 March 2015 and Affordable Warmth took over.

Why I put this in front of people looking for solar

I built this site to compare solar quotes, so it would be easy to say nothing about a scheme that does not pay for panels. That would be the wrong call.

Affordable Warmth is the only real pot of home energy money an ordinary Northern Ireland household can actually get. Up to £7,500 of work, no repayment, no contribution. Nothing on the solar side comes close.

Somewhere near half the people searching for a solar grant in Northern Ireland would be better served by this scheme than by anything I sell. That is a judgement, not a measurement: I cannot see household incomes in the 368 quote requests this site has taken since March. But the pattern is clear enough from what installers in the network tell me. A good share of the people asking about panels are asking because the house is cold and the oil bill is frightening, and for those households insulation and a working boiler are the better first pound.

If your gross household income is under £23,000, read this page before anything else on this site.

Who qualifies in 2026/27

The Housing Executive’s criteria are short. You qualify if you live in Northern Ireland, your total annual gross household income is less than £23,000, and you either own and occupy the property as your main home, have a life interest arrangement in it, or rent from a private landlord.

You do not qualify if you are a Housing Executive or housing association tenant, because social housing is covered by separate programmes. The property must not be a holiday home, a bed and breakfast or a commercial establishment. Grants are subject to funding being available.

Private tenants have an extra hurdle. Your landlord has to agree to the work, be registered with the Department for Communities’ Landlord Registration Scheme, and pay 50% of the total cost of the measures. If your landlord will not do all three, the application stops there.

There is no means test beyond the income cap. Test of Resources, the sliding calculation that sets your contribution on a Disabled Facilities, Renovation or Replacement Grant, does not apply here. The Housing Executive’s wording is that you should not have to contribute to work agreed through the scheme.

What the 2026/27 scheme pays for

The measures are grouped into four priorities and must be carried out in that order. The Housing Executive calls this a whole house approach, and it is the reason you cannot apply for one item off the list.

Priority	Measures
1. Insulation, ventilation, draught-proofing	Loft insulation installed or topped up to 300mm; roof, loft and eaves ventilation; hot water cylinder jacket; cavity wall insulation where suitable; draught proofing of doors and windows; removal and replacement of ineffective cavity wall insulation
2. Heating	Replacing solid fuel, LPG or Economy 7 with natural gas or oil central heating; converting Economy 7 to a high efficiency electric storage system where gas and oil are unavailable; boiler replacement or system upgrade in defined circumstances
3. Windows	Replacing single glazed windows
4. Solid wall measures	Solid wall insulation, detached properties only

Two details worth holding onto. Solid wall insulation is restricted to detached properties, and the Housing Executive expects the other measures done first because it is expensive. And if you turn down a measure you were awarded, you must say so in writing and you lose that portion of the grant. You cannot move the money to something else.

Insulation grants in Northern Ireland

If you are searching for an insulation grant in Northern Ireland, Affordable Warmth is the scheme. There is no separate NI insulation grant for private households.

Insulation sits at priority 1 because a lot of NI housing stock still has gaps. In the 2024/25 Continuous Household Survey, 73% of households reported some form of loft insulation and 58% reported wall insulation. Roughly one household in four has no loft insulation and two in five have no wall insulation. Those are the homes this scheme was built for.

What the grant covers on the insulation side:

• Loft insulation to 300mm, a fresh install or a top-up
• Cavity wall insulation where the survey finds the walls suitable, plus removal and replacement of cavity insulation that has failed
• Draught proofing of doors and windows
• A hot water cylinder jacket
• Roof, loft and eaves ventilation, which goes in alongside insulation to stop condensation
• Solid wall insulation, detached homes only, within the higher £10,000 limit

One condition to check before you appoint anyone. If you are awarded grant aid for cavity or solid wall insulation, the installer you employ must provide a minimum 25-year guarantee. Ask for it in writing before work starts.

If your income is over the threshold and you are paying privately, insulation carries 0% VAT as an energy saving material until 31 March 2027, then reverts to 5%.

Boiler grants in Northern Ireland: the honest position

This is where most pages get it wrong.

The standalone Boiler Replacement Scheme, which paid up to £1,000 towards replacing a boiler more than 15 years old, closed to new applications on 21 September 2023. The Department for Communities said it ended because of budgetary constraints. Boilers already formally approved were still fitted, but nothing new has been accepted since. The GB Boiler Upgrade Scheme, which pays for heat pumps and biomass, has never applied here.

So the only grant-funded boiler route left is Affordable Warmth, and its boiler rule is tighter than most people expect. A replacement or system upgrade is offered where the boiler is at least 15 years old and the householder either:

• is over 65,
• has a child in receipt of Child Benefit or Kinship payments, or
• receives Disability Living Allowance, Personal Independence Payment, Attendance Allowance or Industrial Injuries Benefit.

Meet the income test but none of those three, and a functioning 15-year-old boiler will not be replaced.

There is a second heating route that is easier to miss. The scheme will replace solid fuel, LPG or Economy 7 heating with natural gas or oil central heating, and that is not conditional on the boiler age or benefit tests above. If your house is still on a back boiler, bottled gas or night storage heaters, that is the clause to ask about.

Now the oil reality. 61% of NI households used oil central heating as their main heat source in 2024/25, down from 70% in 2015/16 (NISRA, published 11 November 2025). Affordable Warmth will fund an oil boiler, which surprises people who expect a public scheme to push heat pumps. It funds the heating system your house can practically take, and here that is still oil. There is no NI grant for a domestic heat pump either (heat pump grants NI), and if you are weighing oil against electric heating with panels behind it, the comparison is on solar vs oil heating costs in NI.

How to apply, and why the council route is dead

Plenty of pages still tell you to contact your council’s home energy officer. That advice is three years out of date. The Department for Communities announced on 8 September 2023 that the scheme would move to an applications-based process delivered solely by the Housing Executive. Councils stopped taking referrals from 1 September 2023. Ringing your council will not get you into the scheme.

The route in:

1. Ring NI Energy Advice on 0800 111 4455, or email [email protected]. Free, run by the Housing Executive, open to any NI household.
2. They post you an application form if your household appears to meet the entry requirements. There is no downloadable form and no online application.
3. You return it with your evidence to your local Grant Office: proof of ownership or private tenancy, proof that the property is your main residence, and proof of income (wage slips, benefit award letters, bank statements). Private tenants need their landlord’s consent too.
4. A case is opened and, if the criteria are met, the Housing Executive writes to you and arranges a technical inspection.
5. A technical officer visits. Allow up to 60 minutes. They will want access to bedrooms, the hot press, the roof space, the boiler and the oil tank. If you have cavity walls they will drill small holes to run a borescope camera, and they need your signature for it.
6. An approval pack arrives, confirming the grant aid, the approved measures, the order to do them in, and the deadline for finishing.
7. You appoint your own contractor. This is the part people do not expect.

If you fall just outside the criteria, ring the advice line anyway. It covers every energy support open in NI, including NISEP schemes run through electricity suppliers, which fund insulation and heating and reserve most of their budget for vulnerable and lower-income households.

Timings, and the bit you have to manage yourself

The Housing Executive does not publish an end-to-end waiting time for Affordable Warmth, so I am not going to invent one. What it does publish is the deadline at your end: you are usually expected to complete the approved work within three months of the approval date, and the grant can be cancelled if you overrun. You must not start any work before written approval arrives, because work done before then is not paid for.

Two things are in your control and they decide how long this takes. The first is paperwork: an incomplete application means the Housing Executive has to write back, and the case sits still meanwhile. Get the income evidence together before you ring.

The second is the contractor. The Housing Executive does not appoint one and has no contractual role in the job. You hire the tradesman, you manage them, and you carry the risk if the work is poor. The grant is calculated on a schedule of rates reflecting fair market rates, so a quote can come in above your award. The Housing Executive’s advice is to get estimates from at least three local firms. Extra work must be agreed before it starts, or you pay the difference. Gas boiler work needs a Gas Safe registered engineer.

Why it has never funded solar, and what to do instead

Affordable Warmth is a fuel poverty scheme. Its job is to stop heat leaving the house and to make sure the heating works, which is why the priority order runs insulation first and windows last. Solar PV does not warm a cold house, so it has never been on the measures list, and no other NI grant funds domestic solar either. I would rather say that here than have you find out after paying a deposit.

One caveat. The Warm Healthy Homes Fund consultation, which ran from 27 May to 19 August 2026, did ask whether additional low carbon and renewable technologies should be brought into the successor scheme. Nothing has been decided and the fund is not expected until April 2027.

If you are buying solar privately, three things carry real money and all three apply whatever your income. 0% VAT on domestic solar and on batteries fitted with the panels, running to 31 March 2027, after which the rate reverts to 5%. Export payments of roughly 5p to 8p a unit from NI suppliers, paid voluntarily rather than under the Smart Export Guarantee, which does not extend to Northern Ireland (solar export payments NI has the detail). And the spread between quotes, which is the biggest lever and the one nobody hands you.

For scale on what solar actually does here: the /solar-today/ tracker I run across seven NI towns measured 2,227 kWh from a 4kW system in Belfast over 225 days from 24 January to 5 September 2026, worth £746 at the tracker’s 33.5p per kWh assumption. That is measured generation, not a model, and it is the number to hold against any installer’s projection. Compare quotes from MCS-certified installers across NI, free, no obligation.

What a system should cost is set out in solar panel costs in Northern Ireland, and the full picture on solar-specific support is on solar panel grants.

What happens after March 2028

The Department for Communities published the Warm Healthy Homes Strategy 2026 to 2036 on 5 February 2026, a ten-year framework for tackling fuel poverty here. Its main delivery vehicle is the Warm Healthy Homes Fund, intended to replace Affordable Warmth as the Department’s principal fuel poverty intervention for private sector homes.

The consultation closed on 19 August 2026 and the Department was analysing responses through August and September. The fund is expected in April 2027, with Affordable Warmth running to March 2028 during the changeover. The consultation floated revised eligibility criteria, increased grant limits per household, additional low carbon technologies and stronger consumer protections, but none of that is settled and no new income threshold or grant cap has been published.

If you qualify now, apply now. Work done under Affordable Warmth does not disqualify you from later support, and the current scheme has funding approval for a year and a half beyond the new fund’s expected start.

Where to check this yourself

Housing Executive, Affordable Warmth Scheme. nidirect, Energy saving grants in your area. Department for Communities: Changes to the Affordable Warmth Scheme (8 September 2023), Closure of Boiler Replacement Scheme (21 September 2023), and the Warm Healthy Homes Fund consultation and screening documents. NISRA, household heating and insulation statistics 2024/25 (11 November 2025). All checked on 6 September 2026.

Related pages

• Home energy grants in NI: every current grant and support route
• Solar panel grants in Northern Ireland: why no NI grant funds panels
• Heat pump grants NI: domestic heat pump support here
• Solar panel costs in Northern Ireland: prices by system size
• Solar vs oil heating costs in NI: the comparison if you are on oil