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Boiler replacement grants

There is no SEAI grant for a new gas or oil boiler, and there is a law behind that. Here is what you can get instead.

The short answer: no

SEAI do not grant-aid a new or replacement gas or oil boiler. Not a high-efficiency one, not a condensing one, not in an emergency. SEAI say it in those words on their own page.

This is not a policy SEAI can bend. Since 1 January 2025, Irish law forbids public bodies from paying anything toward installing a stand-alone fossil-fuel boiler. The regulations came in at the end of 2024 to give effect to an EU directive.

European Union (Energy Performance of Buildings) Regulations 2024, S.I. No. 749/2024, signed 19 December 2024, transposing Article 17(15) of Directive (EU) 2024/1275: from 1 January 2025 public bodies shall not provide financial incentives for the installation of stand-alone boilers powered by fossil fuels. Cited in a Dáil written answer of 22 January 2025.

You can still buy a boiler and still fit one. Nothing stops you. The State simply will not help you pay for it.

What a new boiler fixes, and what it does not — what a fresh boiler changes in the house, and when it is still the right call.

There is no SEAI register of boiler installers, so there is nobody for us to list and no picker on this page — for a boiler you are looking for a Registered Gas Installer or an OFTEC technician, not an SEAI contractor.

What you can still get

Heating controls — €700. This is the one that surprises people: you can claim it with or without a new boiler. Better controls — a room thermostat, zoned heating, a timer that actually works — cut what a boiler burns without touching the boiler itself. The home must have been built and lived in before 2011. You cannot claim it if you are applying for, or have already had, a heat pump grant. Amounts last checked 2026-09-07.

Repairs and the rest of the system. Grants stay available for repairing an existing boiler and for radiators, pipework and oil tanks, whether or not they are connected to a fossil-fuel boiler.

A heat pump instead — €4,500 to €6,500 for the unit, plus €1,000 to €2,000 toward the pipes and radiators it needs, plus a €4,000 bonus for leaving oil, gas or coal behind. Stacked, that is the largest grant on offer for anything.

There is also no VAT on heat pump installation, and has not been since 1 January 2025, provided it is one contract and one invoice.

If your boiler has just died

That is the hard case, and the honest advice is not "get a heat pump" — it is this:

  1. Get it looked at properly. A repair is grant-eligible where a replacement is not, and a twelve-year-old boiler with a failed part is often worth fixing.
  2. If it has to be replaced, you are paying for it. Take the heating controls grant at the same time; the work is already open.
  3. Do not let the boiler decide the next twenty years. A heat pump needs a house that holds heat, which usually means insulation first — and that is not a decision to make in a cold week in January. Fix the heat now, plan the change properly.

If the house is already well insulated, that is different: check the heat-loss test before you spend money on a boiler you may replace again in five years.

The "2040 boiler ban" — what the law actually says

You will read that fossil-fuel boilers are banned in Ireland from 2040. We read the directive; that is not what it says.

Three separate things get run together:

  • Binding, and already in force. No public money toward installing a stand-alone fossil-fuel boiler, from 1 January 2025.
  • An aspiration. Member States "shall strive" to replace stand-alone fossil-fuel boilers in existing buildings. Strive, not shall.
  • A reporting template. The only place 2040 appears is a list of what national renovation plans must describe — phasing out fossil fuels "with a view to" a complete phase-out of fossil-fuel boilers by 2040. There is no operative article banning them.

New homes are a different story, and it is already done. Building standards introduced in 2019 made fossil-fuel boilers impractical in new dwellings, and by 2023 fewer than 5% of new homes got one, against 79% a decade earlier. That was achieved by a performance standard, not a prohibition.

No date has been set after which you may not replace a broken boiler in an existing home. Building regulations set minimum efficiencies for replacement boilers, which rather assumes they remain legal.