The Warm Homes: Social Housing Fund

The Warm Homes: Social Housing Fund is government money paid to landlords, not to tenants. It provides funding for energy performance improvements and low-carbon heating improvements to social homes, and the organisations that can receive it are local authorities, combined authorities, registered providers of social housing, and registered charities that own social housing in England¹. If you live in social housing, you never apply for this fund yourself: the work arrives through your landlord, funded by a grant that the landlord has bid for and has to part-match with its own money.

The scheme was previously known as the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund, and it now sits inside the wider Warm Homes Plan, which includes £5 billion for low-income households delivered through this fund, the Warm Homes: Local Grant and a future consolidated scheme². Its target homes are the least efficient ones in the social stock: the fund provides grants for social housing with an EPC rating between G and D, with the aim of bringing those homes up to EPC band C³. Wave 3, which began delivery in April 2025, carries a government commitment of £1.3 billion that the sector has more than matched, meaning over £2.6 billion of retrofit work is currently in delivery⁵.

Fund uses and who manages the cash

The fund pays for two broad kinds of work: energy efficiency upgrades and low-carbon heating measures in English social housing¹. In practice that means the fabric of the building, insulation, windows, ventilation, and then the heating system itself, most often a heat pump replacing a gas boiler. Under the April 2026 addition, a further £100 million was announced with a focus on solar PV and battery installation, so generating and storing electricity on the house itself is now part of what the money can buy⁷. Smart heating controls remain eligible, though digitalisation costs, the back-office systems rather than the kit in the home, can no longer be grant funded⁸.

The money goes to organisations, not individuals. The eligible applicants are local authorities, combined authorities, registered providers of social housing and registered charities that own social housing, either directly or as part of a consortium⁵. Landlords are expected to put in a minimum of 50 per cent match funding alongside the grant⁶, which is why the £1.3 billion of Wave 3 government money has become more than £2.6 billion of work in delivery: the sector has put in at least as much again⁵. For a tenant, that means the landlord has a financial stake in the project, not just a pass-through of public money.

Some funding is devolved rather than bid for nationally. Greater Manchester is the clearest case: the Greater Manchester Combined Authority has received a proportionate share of the national scheme funding, and constituent local authorities and housing associations there need to seek funding via the combined authority rather than through the national scheme⁹. Properties must be within the Greater Manchester boundary, though properties in adjoining areas that form part of the same estate can also be considered⁹. The West Midlands has run a devolved retrofit pilot on similar lines, with the Warm Homes: Social Housing Fund shown there as a £1,300 million indicative national pot, of which 7.8 per cent sits with the combined authority⁶.

For a tenant, the practical shape of the scheme is simple. Your landlord decides to bid, wins funding, contributes its own half, and then the work happens to your home as part of a planned programme. You are not a party to the grant and you contribute nothing to it. What you may experience is disruption during the works, and afterwards a warmer home with a different heating system, which takes some getting used to, particularly where a gas boiler is replaced by a heat pump.

Wave 3 spending of £1.3 billion and 12,900 homes reported

The headline numbers come from two places: the budget allocations, and the official statistics on what has actually been installed.

The delivery figures are early. The scheme's draft guidance was published on 13 May 2024 and the delivery window opened in April 2025¹, so by the end of July 2026 the fund had been installing for roughly a year and a half. In that time around 25,770 measures have been reported by grant recipients in around 12,900 households¹. The gap between those two numbers is the nature of whole-house retrofit: a home that receives loft insulation, wall insulation and a heat pump counts once as a household and three times as measures.

Two cautions apply to every number in the statistics release. First, all figures are provisional and may be revised in future releases as additional returns are submitted¹. Second, the release does not disaggregate performance by individual grant recipient, so there is no published league table of which landlord has delivered what¹. The methodology note published alongside the August 2026 releases explains how the statistics are produced, including the data sources, quality assurance processes and data limitations¹¹.

The scale of the ambition is much larger than the delivery so far. The government's stated aim for 2025 to 2026 was up to 60,000 homes upgraded through grant funding under the fund, alongside social housing provider co-funding¹⁰, and the wider Warm Homes Plan carries an ambition to lift up to one million homes out of fuel poverty¹². Against those numbers, 12,900 households is a start rather than a finish, and the pace will have to rise sharply through the Wave 3 window, which runs to September 2028 with all grant funding required to be transferred and spent by 31 March 2028⁵.

Why the totals look as they do

Three things drive how much gets delivered and how fast: the condition of the social stock, the match funding requirement, and the standard the work has to reach.

The stock condition is the starting point. The fund exists because a large share of social homes sit below EPC band C, and the scheme's purpose is to take that stock up to the standard⁴. The eligible band is deliberately wide, G to D³, which pushes landlords towards whole-house projects on their worst-performing homes rather than scattergun single measures. The parliamentary briefing on the fund records that the government started accepting funding applications for Wave 3 from local authorities, combined authorities, registered providers of social housing and registered charities that own social housing⁵, and the size of the resulting pipeline, over £2.6 billion in delivery, reflects how much of the stock needs the work.

The match funding requirement shapes who takes part. A minimum 50 per cent contribution⁶ means the fund is not free money for a landlord with an empty balance sheet: it is a half-price project for a landlord that can fund the other half. That is why the sector's contribution has more than matched the government's £1.3 billion⁵, and it is also why delivery is concentrated among larger landlords with borrowing capacity. For the household, the important consequence is that the landlord has skin in the game and an incentive to see the project through to a home that actually performs.

The standard the work must reach drives the cost per home. The aim is EPC C⁴, achieved as a package of measures rather than a single intervention⁷, and the work is planned under PAS 2035, introduced in 2019 as a framework for best practice in domestic energy retrofit, which has to be managed by a qualified Retrofit Coordinator¹³. Whole-house retrofit to EPC C costs more per home than a boiler swap, which is why the per-home figures in this scheme run into the tens of thousands of pounds in some cases rather than the thousands.

Conditions landlords must meet

The scheme rules are set out in the Wave 3 guidance and in the devolved arrangements for combined authorities. The ones that matter most to how a project runs are these.

• Eligibility of the applicant. Local authorities, combined authorities, registered providers of social housing and registered charities that own social housing, directly or as part of a consortium⁵.
• Eligibility of the homes. Social housing rated EPC G to D, taken up to EPC C³.
• Match funding. A minimum 50 per cent contribution from the landlord⁶.
• Assessment of applications. Challenge Fund applications are assessed on a pass or flag basis: a flag means the answer does not provide adequate assurance that the applicant will comply with the scheme's requirements, a pass means it does¹⁴.
• Funding in principle. All applications that meet the minimum requirements are awarded funding in principle, and an application that meets some but not all requirements gives the lead applicant the opportunity to address the shortcomings¹⁴.
• Cost caps. Lead grant recipients may exceed the per-property cost caps in individual phases, but are held responsible for ensuring the project as a whole averages within the caps¹⁴.
• Spend deadlines. Both grant and co-funding must be spent by the end of each financial year⁸, and all Wave 3 grant funding must be transferred and spent by 31 March 2028⁵.

Two further rules shape what a tenant might actually see. Void properties can be included as long as they are receiving low-carbon heating measures⁸, so an empty home on your street may be done up under the scheme before it is relet. And the on-gas low carbon heating incentive offer allows up to 10 per cent of the homes in an application to gain access to a £20,000 grant fund per home¹⁴, a deliberate exception that lets landlords put heat pumps into homes still on the gas grid where the cost is high.

In Greater Manchester, the devolved rules add their own conditions: an administration and assessment grant is provided as a fixed 10 per cent of the capital grant, and for Year 2 Phase 1 the combined authority can cover project costs incurred from 1 April 2026, with completion of the block going into 2027 to 2028⁸. Applicants there request an application pack by email and follow the GMCA process rather than the national one⁹.

Funding social housing upgrades in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland

The Warm Homes: Social Housing Fund covers England only¹⁵, and the same is true of its sister scheme, the Warm Homes: Local Grant¹⁶. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each fund social housing upgrades through their own arrangements, and a household's address determines which system applies.

Scotland runs the Social Housing Net Zero Heat Fund, a fund designed to accelerate the delivery of energy efficiency and clean heat to existing social housing¹⁷. It is a distinct scheme with its own rules and timetable, not a branch of the English fund, and social landlords in Scotland apply to it rather than to Westminster's programme.

Wales takes a standards-led route rather than a single fund. The Welsh Housing Quality Standard, introduced in 2002, applies to registered social landlords and local authorities with social rented housing stock, and the 2023 version is a legally binding standard which all social landlords in Wales are legally obliged to meet¹⁸. Local authorities must comply pursuant to section 111 of the Housing (Wales) Act 2014, and all existing social homes must meet the standard²⁰. The Welsh Government has described the 2023 standard as more demanding than in the other home nations²¹, and reported that 100 per cent of social homes met the previous standard as of 31 March 2022²⁰. Alongside the standard, Welsh households, including social tenants where their landlord participates, can access the Nest scheme, which offers free, impartial advice and potentially free home energy efficiency improvements such as insulation, a heat pump or solar panels²².

Northern Ireland is in transition. The Affordable Warmth Scheme ends in March 2028 and will be replaced by a scheme known as the Warm Healthy Homes Fund²³. The new fund is intended to support lower-income households who are experiencing, or at risk of, fuel poverty by improving the energy efficiency of homes and making them warmer, healthier and more affordable to heat, with support targeted at lower-income households in owner-occupied and private rented homes²⁴. Work on it is actively progressing, alongside separate arrangements for home heating oil support²⁵. Until it launches, social housing energy upgrades in Northern Ireland sit outside the English fund entirely.

The impact on a home's self sufficiency in energy

For a social tenant, this fund is one of the few routes to energy independence that requires nothing from the household itself. The grant and the match funding are the landlord's problem; the insulation, the heat pump and, under the 2026 addition, the solar panels and battery⁷ arrive as a programme of work on the home. A home taken from EPC G or F to EPC C needs less energy to stay warm in the first place, which is the cheapest and most reliable form of independence: demand you no longer have. Add a heat pump and the home leaves the gas grid, ending dependence on a fossil fuel whose price moves with world markets. Add solar and battery and some of the electricity the heat pump consumes is generated on the roof.

The limits are just as real. The fund does not remove dependence on the electricity grid: a heat pump home without solar still draws every unit from a supplier, and a home with solar still needs the grid at night and in winter unless the battery is large. The household remains a customer of an energy supplier, subject to its prices and its billing, and the retrofit does not change that relationship. Delivery is also the landlord's decision and the landlord's timetable: a tenant cannot trigger the fund, cannot choose the measures and cannot opt out of the programme's consequences, such as a heating system that works differently from the boiler it replaced.

The wider direction of policy is towards more of this, not less. The Warm Homes Plan's £5 billion for low-income households runs through this fund, the Warm Homes: Local Grant and a future consolidated scheme², with an ambition to lift up to one million homes out of fuel poverty¹², and the government has committed to fully decarbonising the UK's electricity grid by 2035, the same year new gas boiler sales end. For a social household, the realistic picture is this: the fabric and the heating system move towards independence under schemes like this one, while the grid, the supplier and the meter remain part of daily life for the foreseeable future.