Fact check: No reliable data exist to compare incomes of homes with heat pumps

13 March 2026, 6:15pm

A 2024 evaluation asked heat pump grant recipients about their incomes.

Reform UK Treasury spokesman Robert Jenrick said on Tuesday: “More than half of the grants (for heat pumps) are going to households that earn more than £52,000-a-year – so some of the lowest-earning people in the country are paying for better-off people to have them.”

Evaluation

Mr Jenrick’s figures come directly from a Government report, which suggested that 57% of households who had benefitted from the Government’s heat pump and biomass boiler grant scheme had an income of more than £52,000 before tax. This figure excludes households which did not share their income with the survey.

The report said that this is “high” compared to the median household disposable income of £32,300 in the year ending March 2022. Disposable income is the amount left to spend or save after taxes, so this is comparing two very different figures.

There is no official figure that can be directly compared to the £52,000 number. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) told the Press Association that a better figure is mean gross household income, which was £63,500 in the year ending March 2022.

However even this is a limited comparison as mean figures can be heavily skewed by a small number of very high earners.

The facts

In January 2025 the Government released an interim report on the boiler upgrade scheme (BUS), which supports households to install either a heat pump or a biomass boiler.

That report said: “Over half (57%) had an annual household income of more than £52,000, which is high compared to the median national household income of £32,300.”

– The 57%

A Government survey asked households that had benefited from the BUS to say if their household income fell into one of eight categories.

The data that accompanied the report showed that 47% of respondents said their household income was £52,000 or above, while 36% said it was below that amount (see sheet 55_QF03, column B). A further 17 % did not want to answer the question.

When excluding those that did not want to answer, 57% of households had incomes above or equal to £52,000, and 43% had incomes below that amount.

– The £32,000

When asked for their income, the householders were asked: “What is the household’s approximate total income before tax and any other deductions? This includes earnings from employment or self-employment, income from benefits and pensions, as well as income from other sources such as interest from savings.”

This is what produced the results that 47% of respondents earned more than £52,000.

The Government’s report then compared this figure to what it called “median national household income of £32,300”.

The footnotes of the report reveal that it got this number from the ONS dataset entitled “Average household income, UK: financial year ending 2022”.

That dataset shows that the “median household disposable income in the UK was £32,300” in the year ending March 2022 (the ONS has since revised the figure to £32,400).

The ONS defines disposable income as “the amount of money that households have available for spending and saving after direct taxes, such as Income Tax, National Insurance and Council Tax, have been accounted for.

“It includes earnings from employment, private pensions and investments as well as cash benefits provided by the state.”

This means that the £32,300 figure is how much households have left after tax, while the survey which produced the £52,000 figure was asking for incomes “before tax and any other deductions”.

The ONS pointed PA in the direction of its gross income figures, which are calculated before direct taxes and include benefits and pensions.

In the year ending March 2022, ONS data show that mean gross household income was £63,549 (see table 28). For those living in a home they own, the gross household income was £73,842 (see table 26).

The ONS does not publish median figures for gross household income, nor does it publish gross household income ranges. Mean figures can be significantly skewed by a few very high earning households.

Therefore this figure is also not a particularly good comparison with the data collected on people who have received BUS grants.

When PA asked the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero about its figures, it said that it had chosen the disposable income figure because it was a median figure, while the gross income was a mean figure.

Pre-tax income was also used to compare the BUS with its predecessor, the Renewable Heat Incentive. The RHI had also used pre-tax as a measure in its evaluation.