How Much Imported Energy a UK Household Uses

For most UK households, almost all the energy that arrives at the front door has been imported in some form. The gas in the boiler, the electricity at the socket and the oil or LPG in the tank are commodities that the UK partly produces at home and partly buys from abroad, and the household's share of that dependence is set by how the home is heated. Home energy consumption accounts for 22% of the UK's carbon emissions¹, and the UK is, in the government's own words, "a net energy importer with a high dependence on gas and oil"².

The scale of that dependence is easy to state. Around 84% of UK domestic properties are connected to the gas grid³, and in approximately 23 million dwellings, 85% of the total, gas boilers provide heating or hot water⁴. The rest heat with oil, LPG, electricity or solid fuels, and every one of those routes carries a different mix of imported commodity, delivered fuel and grid electricity. This page traces each route, what it costs, and what changing it does to a household's exposure.

Which home energy sources count as imported

Imported energy, for a household, is any energy the home cannot make or store itself and must buy in: mains gas through the pipe, electricity through the wire, or oil, LPG and solid fuel delivered by road. The distinction matters because each import carries a different kind of dependence. A home on mains gas depends on the gas network, a supplier, and the wholesale gas price, most of which is set by international markets. A home heating with oil depends on a delivery company, a storage tank and a commodity price that can move sharply between one order and the next. A home with a heat pump depends on the electricity grid alone.

The household's exposure is not only physical but financial. When wholesale prices move, the movement reaches the bill: the price cap for a dual fuel home with typical usage in Great Britain paying by direct debit was around £1,758 a year for the period 1 January to 31 March 2026⁸. Energy spending already takes a substantial share of household income: the average required energy cost across all households in England was 6.8% of income on a provisional 2025 figure⁹, and in 2021 some 4.93 million households in England were spending more than 10% of their income on domestic energy after housing costs¹⁰.

What a household can change is the route by which energy arrives. The sections below set out each route in turn, from the grid supplied majority to the options that reduce or restructure a home's imports. The lens throughout is the one that matters for household energy independence: what comes from somewhere else, and what a home could supply or control itself.

Grid-supplied gas and electricity dominate household energy

Most homes receive energy through two networks. Gas reaches the boiler through the national grid, and electricity arrives through the power network, where about 42% of UK generation comes from renewable sources, with wind the biggest contributor¹¹. Both networks carry a mix of home produced and imported energy, and a household on both has no practical way of telling which kilowatt hour is which.

The gas side is the larger dependence. Around 84% of domestic properties are connected to the gas grid³, and gas boilers provide heating or hot water in approximately 23 million dwellings, 85% of the stock⁴. Bills for these homes are calculated on an assumed annual consumption of 18,000 kWh¹², a figure that gives a sense of the volume of gas a typical home burns through in a year. Every unit of it is a purchase from a supplier, at a price shaped by wholesale markets in which the UK is a net importer².

The electricity side is a different kind of import. A household with solar panels can displace part of its electricity purchases with its own generation, and a battery can shift more of that self supply into the evening. Gas is harder to substitute at home: a household cannot make gas, and the practical routes away from it are to stop using it, by switching to electric heating, or to rely on the network carrying a growing share of domestically produced biomethane. The pages on self-consumption and the self-sufficiency ratio set out how to measure how much of a home's electricity is its own.

Off-grid homes: their numbers and locations

Not being on the gas grid is far from unusual. Four million UK households, 15% of the total, are off the mains gas grid¹³. The most recent official statistics put the figure higher: an estimated 4.8 million households across Great Britain were not connected to the gas grid in 2024, which was 16.0% of domestic properties⁵. The two figures differ because they count different things at different dates, and both are official; the 4.8 million estimate is the newer and more detailed one.

The distribution is uneven. In 2024, 26.6% of domestic properties in Inner London were off the gas grid, against 14.9% in Outer London, and 19.5% in Wales¹⁴. In Scotland, over 450,000 homes do not use gas as their primary heating fuel¹⁵. Northern Ireland has a distinctive pattern: many of the UK's oil heated homes are there⁶, a legacy of a network that never reached much of the province's housing stock.

Off-grid does not mean independent. A home with an oil boiler is off the gas grid but depends on road deliveries, a storage tank and a commodity price it cannot hedge. A home with electric heating is off the gas grid but fully dependent on the power network. The routes away from the gas network are set out in disconnecting from the gas grid, and the fuller question of leaving the electricity network too is covered in going off-grid.

Oil boilers: the standard heating choice away from the grid

Oil is the most common off-grid heating fuel. Around 1.5 million UK homes use oil for heating, including many in Northern Ireland⁶. The fuel is bought in bulk, stored in a tank and burned in a boiler, and building regulations set a minimum efficiency of 85% for oil boilers⁶.

The cost exposure is severe. The UK average cost of heating a typical three bedroom house is around 50% higher with heating oil than with mains gas¹³. The price is also volatile in a way mains gas bills are not: between the end of February and mid-March 2026, the average price of home heating oil in the UK increased by over 100%, from approximately 60 pence per litre to over 120 pence per litre¹⁶. When prices move like that, a household's annual heating cost can change materially between one tank refill and the next.

For a household's independence, oil is a poor position: the fuel is imported, the price is unhedged, the tank must be maintained, and a delivery failure in cold weather is a real risk. The one advantage over mains gas is that a household can buy when prices are low and store months of fuel, a form of buffering that gas customers do not have. A consultation document on building regulations in Northern Ireland used a domestic oil tariff of 7.0p per kWh in its analysis¹⁸, a figure that dates from 2023 and that the 2026 spike has overtaken.

LPG: road-delivered and the costliest common fuel

Liquefied petroleum gas is the other main delivered fuel. The main difference between mains gas and LPG is that LPG is delivered by road and stored in a tank rather than being piped directly into the home⁶. Around two hundred thousand UK homes use it⁶, and the trade body for the sector puts the number at 193,000 homes³.

It is the most expensive of the common heating fuels. The UK average cost of heating a typical three bedroom house is around 100% higher with LPG than with mains gas¹³. An official analysis puts the annual cost of bulk propane for a three bed semi-detached house at £1,800 to £2,200¹⁴, while an independent estimate for a medium use household is around £923 a year for heating alone⁶. The two figures differ in what they cover and when they were read, but both point the same way: LPG costs roughly double mains gas for the same home.

The arithmetic of the fuel is straightforward. A litre of LPG converts to 7.1kWh, on the government's estimate, and in July 2025 it cost an average 57p per litre⁶. Tank ownership is a further complication: you might need to buy or rent your LPG tank from your supplier, which adds to the cost, and if you switch supplier you will need to transfer ownership of the tank to the new supplier or get a new tank installed⁶. That is a real constraint on switching that mains gas customers do not face.

On carbon, LPG emits 12% less CO2 than oil and 35% less than coal, according to the trade body³. The saving over oil is modest, and LPG remains a fossil fuel delivered by road. A consultation on Northern Ireland building regulations assessed an LPG boiler replacing an oil boiler as acceptable on both primary energy and delivered energy measures¹⁸, but acceptability under building rules is not the same as value for money.

Biomethane: renewable gas through the existing mains

Biomethane is the one route that changes where the gas comes from without changing anything in the home. It is a gas produced from organic material, cleaned to grid quality and fed into the existing network, so a household with a gas boiler can use it without knowing the difference. The gas is produced in the UK, which reduces the imported fraction of the gas a home burns, though the household still depends on the network, a supplier and a bill.

The scale is already material. Official statistics on the Domestic Renewable Heat Incentive describe output "enough to heat almost 770,000 typical UK homes for a year"¹⁹. That is a domestic energy source flowing through the same pipes as imported gas, and it is growing, but it remains a fraction of the demand from 23 million gas boiler homes⁴.

The emissions picture for home heating overall is what drives policy interest. Heating our homes accounts for around 14% of the UK's total greenhouse gas emissions, according to the most recent Ofgem annual report²⁰, while the previous year's report put the figure at 15%²¹. The two reports differ by a percentage point, reflecting different data years, but the order of magnitude is consistent: home heating is one of the largest single sources of UK emissions, and most of it is gas.

For a household, biomethane is a change that happens upstream rather than at home. It does not reduce a bill directly, and it does not reduce dependence on a supplier or the network. What it reduces is the imported fraction of the gas itself, which is why bodies such as the gas industry argue that home grown gas retains a strategic role in UK energy security. A household wanting to reduce its own exposure rather than the nation's has to change the heating system, which is where heat pumps come in.

Heat pumps: one electricity supply instead of fuel deliveries

A heat pump replaces every other fuel import with a single one: electricity. For every unit of electricity a heat pump uses, it typically produces three to four units of heat⁷. Most of the heat delivered into the home is not imported energy at all: it is heat moved from the outside air or the ground, with electricity doing the work of moving it.

The technology is at the start of a steep curve. Heat pumps are currently installed in 1% of UK homes²². The Climate Change Committee projects that domestic heat pumps will be needed in at least half, but likely closer to 80%, of homes by 2050 to reach net zero²², and that approximately 10% of existing homes will need to be heated by a heat pump by 2030²³. A parliamentary committee report puts the 2040 figure at 52% of existing homes¹⁰. The direction is unambiguous even if the dates shift.

Two findings matter for households considering the switch. First, 80% to 90% of UK homes do not need additional insulation for a heat pump to work effectively, according to evidence to a parliamentary committee²⁴, and the government's heat pumps investment roadmap states that 90% of British homes have sufficient insulation and electrical capacity for a heat pump²⁵. Second, the electricity a heat pump draws is already a growing stream: in 2024 domestic heat pump electricity consumption was 169 ktoe, over four times that of a decade earlier in 2014²⁶.

The planning and installation rules are permissive but not unconditional. An air source heat pump on a house or in its garden is generally permitted development, subject to conditions: the outdoor compressor unit must not exceed 1.5 cubic metres on a house, all parts must be at least one metre from the property boundary, installations on pitched roofs are not permitted development, and permitted development rights do not apply within the curtilage of a listed building or a scheduled monument²⁷. Noise is the condition most likely to bite: the heat pump on its own must stay at or below 42 decibels measured from a metre away from any habitable room, and if the level is exceeded, planning permission is needed²⁸. In Wales, installation of either a ground source or air source heat pump must comply with the Building Regulations²⁹. One scheme note: an air to air heat pump is not considered a renewable system in ECO4³⁰, which matters for households looking at that scheme.

For a household's imports, the change is structural. Oil and LPG deliveries stop, along with their tanks, their price spikes and their delivery risk. What remains is the electricity grid, and the household's exposure becomes the electricity price and the grid's generation mix. A home with solar panels can supply part of that electricity itself, which is why heat pumps and generation are usually considered together: the page on how much a heat pump and EV cut imports works through the numbers.

How each option affects a home's imported energy share

Each heating route leaves a household with a different balance of dependence, and the differences are worth stating plainly.

The gas grid majority has the smallest scope for change at home: a household on mains gas can cut consumption but cannot change where the gas comes from. Oil and LPG households have more exposure but also more storage, and the 2026 oil price spike showed how quickly that exposure can turn into a bill¹⁶. Heat pump households consolidate everything into one import, electricity, which is the one input a home can partly produce itself with solar panels, and the one whose domestic generation share, about 42% renewable¹¹, is rising.

The financial stakes are real. Average required energy costs across all households in England were 6.8% of income on a provisional 2025 figure⁹, and 4.93 million households in England were already spending more than 10% of their income on domestic energy in 2021¹⁰, before the price spikes of the mid 2020s. Reducing the imported fraction is therefore not only an environmental choice but a budgetary one, and the pages on the cost of energy independence and on whether a UK home can be fully self-sufficient set out what the reduction costs and where its limits lie.