It is 8:40 on a Thursday evening. The installer finishes the last survey of the day, opens his phone and finds eleven unread messages. Nine ask the same thing in different words: does this come with a grant, how much, and when does it land. One of them has read about £9,000 and wants to know why he was quoted £7,500. Another is a barn conversion. He answers the first three from the van, from memory, using what he remembers from last year.
This is not a knowledge problem. It is a distribution problem, for knowledge with a short shelf life.
The customers are asking about a number that is a hundred days old
Look at what people actually type into Google and the pattern is obvious: boiler upgrade scheme 9000, air source heat pump grant 9000, is the heat pump grant going up, heat pump grant cut, boiler upgrade scheme cancelled, when does the 7500 heat pump grant end, is heat pump grant means tested, can landlords get heat pump grant, does the boiler upgrade scheme apply in scotland. Real Google autocomplete suggestions for the UK, pulled on 1 August 2026.
The "9000" is not a customer error. From 21 July 2026 to 31 March 2027, air-to-water and ground source installations in homes off the gas grid heated by oil or LPG get £9,000 instead of £7,500 (GOV.UK, Boiler Upgrade Scheme). Everything else stays as it was: £7,500 for air-to-water and ground source, £5,000 biomass, £2,500 air-to-air.
Your customer read a headline. Whether the headline applies to their house depends on three things they rarely all know.
Five rule changes in under three years. Two of them since April.
From the DESNZ change log for the scheme: 23 October 2023, the grant rises to £7,500. 8 May 2024, the requirement to have no outstanding EPC insulation recommendations is dropped. 29 May 2025, permitted development rights change. 28 April 2026, a bigger one: multi-technology installations allowed, £2,500 introduced for air-to-air, the valid-EPC requirement relaxed, MCS becomes the sole certification scheme, and installers are required to deduct the grant from the price quoted to the customer. Then 21 July 2026, the £9,000 off-gas-grid uplift.
Two material changes in a hundred days. Any page, PDF or WhatsApp template written before April is now telling someone something untrue. That is the real gap in this market: not explaining the grant, but keeping the explanation current.
Why the grant eats your inbox: it is 58% of the decision
The Boiler Upgrade Scheme is installer-led. You apply, you receive the money, the customer pays your price minus the grant. MCS certification is mandatory. England and Wales only. It is not means tested, and second homes, rented properties and businesses are all in; new builds still under construction, social housing and gas hybrids are out.
So the paperwork is yours, and so is the pressure. The DESNZ statistics published on 30 July 2026, covering data to the end of June, put numbers on it: 135,500 voucher applications to date, 98% of them air-to-water; 115,215 vouchers issued and 87,266 redemptions paid. June alone brought 4,512 applications, up 21% year on year. The median cost of an air-to-water install in Q2 2026 was £12,908 including the grant — in real terms 11% cheaper than the £14,545 of Q2 2023. Ground source: £27,232.
Do the arithmetic. £7,500 against a £12,908 median is 58% of the decision. Of course they message you about it before they message you about anything else.
Worth knowing what you are usually replacing: 55% gas, 17% oil, 13% homes with no heating at all, and 62% of grant-funded homes were on the gas grid. That last figure is why "are you off the gas grid?" cannot be assumed — the majority are not.
Funding is confirmed to 2029/30 under the Warm Homes Plan announced on 21 January 2026, with £400m for 2026/27 and a target of 390,000 homes over 2025/26–2029/30. But vouchers are still issued first come, first served until the year's budget cap is reached.
The six things your first-line reply must refuse to answer
This is where most chat tools in this trade fall over: they answer what they know and what they don't at exactly the same speed.
- The final price. £12,908 is a national median, not a quote. Without a survey, any figure is invented.
- Whether the £9,000 applies. It needs all three: off gas grid, currently oil or LPG, air-to-water or ground source. Customers routinely get the first one wrong.
- Whether they are eligible at all. Depends on details they hold badly — build status, tenure, whether the property has already had public funding for the same work.
- The deadline. GOV.UK tells the customer to install within 120 days of applying. Ofgem tells the installer there are three months from voucher issue, six for ground source. Both are correct and they reconcile, but customer and installer will quote different numbers from memory. Do not let a bot pick one.
- Whether the budget will hold out. First come, first served to the annual cap. Nobody knows.
- Anything outside England and Wales. Scotland and Northern Ireland run their own schemes. If you have not verified them this month, the honest answer is "different scheme, let me check" — not a guess.
What a first-line reply can do is not small: answer at the hour the message arrives, establish the postcode and the current fuel before anything else, say what is open and what is closed today, state plainly that the grant comes off your quote because the rules now require it, collect the four facts your surveyor needs, and book the visit.
Building it so it does not rot
The method is boring, which is why it works: the correct answer lives in one place and comes out right across all forty conversations.
- One source of truth with a review date on it. Current amounts, current window, current eligibility. No date, no trust.
- The first two questions are the postcode and the current fuel. Everything about the £9,000 hangs off them.
- Say the grant is deducted from the quote. Since 28 April 2026 that is an obligation, and it removes the customer's biggest fear: fronting the money.
- Collect the four survey facts in the conversation — existing system, floor area, radiators or underfloor, and whether the property is occupied.
- Close honestly: "the exact figure comes from the survey." No decoration.
On cost, since it surprises people: answering on WhatsApp inside the 24-hour customer service window carries no platform charge. Since 1 July 2025 Meta prices per message and only charges for templates; messages the customer sends are free, and inside that window non-template messages are free too, per Meta's own pricing documentation. What you pay for is reopening a conversation after it closes. Answering fast is the cheap option. Chasing later is the expensive one. We break the billing down in WhatsApp Business API: what it costs.
Where Zatio fits
Zatio is an AI agent that handles WhatsApp and web chat: it asks for the postcode and the current fuel before it says anything about money, says what is open today, collects what your surveyor needs and books the visit. What it will not do, deliberately, is tell anyone what grant they are going to get. If you want to try it against your own enquiries, here is the product.
General information, not financial or legal advice. For a specific property, check the current scheme rules and your MCS obligations before quoting anything.