Statutory guidance

Warm Home Discount: eligibility statement, England and Wales, 2025 to 2026

Published 30 September 2025

Applies to England and Wales

Introduction

This section explains the Warm Home Discount scheme in England and Wales and outlines the content of this eligibility statement.

The Warm Home Discount scheme obligates participating suppliers to provide rebates to eligible low-income households. The scheme helps households in, or at risk of, fuel poverty with direct energy bill payments as well as other financial and energy-related support.

The government consulted on expanding the scheme for winter 2025 to 2026 with proposals to end the use of the property high cost to heat threshold, making all energy billpayers who are on a qualifying means tested benefit eligible for the discount and confirmed the scheme’s changes in the government response published in June 2025^{[footnote 1]}. The resultant Warm Home Discount (Amendment) Regulations 2025 were published on 19 September 2025^{[footnote 2]}.

The scheme continues to provide rebates to pensioners in receipt of Pension Credit Guarantee Credit, under the ‘Core Group 1’ cohort. Through the removal of the property high cost to heat threshold, households eligible for a rebate under Core Group 2 are now all those who are in receipt of one of the qualifying means tested benefits.

As required under Regulation 9 of The Warm Home Discount (England and Wales) Regulations 2022, the Secretary of State for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (‘the department’) must publish an eligibility statement for each scheme year.

This statement describes the criteria used to determine eligibility for a rebate under Core Group 2.^{[footnote 3]}

This statement therefore sets out:

• Low-income criteria - the qualifying means tested benefits which a person must receive to meet the low-income criteria
• Eligible property types - the types of properties which can be eligible for a rebate

Amendments for scheme year 15

Winter 2022 to 2023 was the first year of the reformed scheme and the twelfth year of the scheme since it began in 2011. The then-Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy published the first eligibility statement which applied to scheme year 12 and all future scheme years, unless amended or replaced by a new eligibility statement.

The department revised certain elements of the eligibility statement for scheme year 13^{[footnote 4]} and published the amended eligibility statement that applied to scheme year 13. The eligibility statement for scheme year 14^{[footnote 5]} had minor revisions to scheme year 13.

For scheme year 15, implementing the proposed removal of the property high cost to heat threshold^{[footnote 6]}, making all energy billpayers who are on a qualifying means tested benefit eligible for the discount necessitates substantial revisions to the eligibility criteria.

As well as these changes, there have also been changes to the eligible benefits. For scheme years 12 to 14, tax credits were considered in the eligibility criteria. However, as of 5 April 2025, tax credits are no longer available^{[footnote 7]} so there won’t be an income threshold for tax credits for SY15. This eligibility statement for scheme year 15 therefore contains major updates and revisions to the Eligibility Statement for scheme year 14^{[footnote 8]}.

Eligibility statement

Core Group 2 eligibility overview

This section provides an overview of the eligibility criteria for Core Group 2. This section sets out the qualifying benefits.

Households eligible under Core Group 2 must satisfy the criteria of being low income, by being in receipt of a qualifying means tested benefit and being named on the electricity bill. The qualifying date is set by the Secretary of State and is set to be as close as possible to the date of the data-matching process, to minimise the number of changes in people’s circumstances between the qualifying date and awarding the rebates. For 2025 to 2026, the qualifying date is 24 August 2025.

In addition to meeting the low-income criteria, the household must meet the additional conditions set out in regulation 8(5) of the Regulations. These are being a domestic customer of an energy supplier, occupying the premises as their sole or main residence, and the rebate recipient or their partner being in receipt of the qualifying benefit.^{[footnote 9]}

This eligibility statement applies for scheme year 15 (2025 to 2026) only, as the current Warm Home Discount (England and Wales) Regulations 2022 expire on 31 March 2026.

Through data matching, the majority of eligible households will receive their rebates automatically from their energy supplier, without having to apply. Where it is not clear from the data-matching process if a household is eligible for a rebate, for instance where we have not been able to match them with a participating energy supplier, they will be sent a letter explaining that they may contact a helpline to check their eligibility.

List of qualifying benefits

The following benefits are the qualifying benefits for meeting the low-income eligibility criteria:

• Income related Employment and Support Allowance
• Income based Jobseeker’s Allowance
• Income Support
• Housing Benefit
• Universal Credit
• the Savings Credit element of Pension Credit^{[note 1]}

Notes:

1. Where a household receives both the Savings Credit and the Guarantee Credit elements of Pension Credit, they will be eligible under Core Group 1, not Core Group 2, by virtue of their receipt of the Guarantee Credit element.

Assumptions

Due to the nature of the eligibility criteria, it is not possible to set exactly how many people will be eligible each scheme year. This is determined largely by:

• the number of people in receipt of a qualifying means tested benefit on the qualifying date
• the proportion of these households who contact the Warm Home Discount helpline when advised and required to do so
• the proportion of these households who ultimately turn out to be eligible as the recipient of the benefit, their partner or legal representative is named on the account of a participating electricity supplier on the qualifying date^{[footnote 10]}

Therefore, we establish the two following assumptions to forecast the number of rebates:

Matching rate: The number of households who will be identified as eligible through data matching between the government and energy suppliers and who will receive their rebate automatically. This is known as the ‘matching rate’. The Secretary of State therefore must estimate the expected data-matching rate before setting the threshold. This data-matching rate will be informed by previous scheme years and ‘end-to-end’ tests held with energy suppliers prior to the ‘live run’ of eligible households being identified and matched with participating energy suppliers.

Sweep-up rate: The number of households who will receive the rebate through the sweep-up process. Not all low-income households will match with an energy supplier. These households will be contacted by letter and advised to contact the Warm Home Discount helpline and provide details about their electricity supply in order to establish if they are eligible. This depends on the number of households who contact the helpline before the claim deadline (27 February 2026) and the number of those who meet the electricity account criteria. The Secretary of State therefore must estimate the number of unmatched households who will contact the helpline and be eligible for a rebate as a result. This assumption is based on the sweep-up rates from previous scheme years.

Following the removal of the high cost to heat threshold which will bring about 2.7 million households into the scheme across the whole of Great Britain, we expect the spend for scheme year 15 to rise to around £1 billion.

Eligible property types

This section explains the approach to determining which property types can be eligible for a rebate from the address data.

Only households living in an eligible domestic premises may receive a rebate. Properties found to be ineligible are removed from the data-matching process.

Occupants of a property who do not have a direct relationship with an electricity supplier are not eligible for a rebate; a person must be a customer of an electricity supplier and be an account holder or named on an electricity bill to be eligible. For that reason, properties where the electricity supply comes via an intermediary, like Park Homes, are not eligible. A person living permanently in a care home, including residential homes and nursing homes, would also not be eligible for a rebate, as they would not have a direct relationship with the electricity supplier for the property.

Households living in a property that is not supplied with electricity wholly or mainly for domestic purposes are also not eligible for a rebate.

Customers living in park homes and not directly supplied with electricity may still be eligible through the Park Homes Warm Home Discount scheme^{[footnote 11]}, administered by Charis Grants. This scheme is funded by energy suppliers, who may choose to contribute to the scheme or fund other financial and energy-related measures to meet their obligations under the Industry Initiatives element of the Warm Home Discount scheme. There is finite funding available for this scheme each year, depending on what suppliers choose to fund. Applications for the Park Homes scheme are only open for a short period and are assessed in order of date received until the scheme closes. Once the allocated number of applications is reached, the scheme closes.

In previous scheme years, caravans and annexes to properties were excluded from the Core Group 2 part of the scheme because they were not sufficiently comparable to other property types. This means we could not model or rank their energy costs in a comparable way to other property types, for the purposes of applying the high cost to heat threshold.

Annexes

For scheme year 15, with the removal of the property high cost to heat threshold, if an annex has its own electricity supply and the person residing in the annex is in receipt of one of the qualifying means tested benefits and is named on the bill, they will now be eligible for the discount in winter 2025 to 2026. Similarly, even if the address refers to an annex, but the person in receipt of the qualifying means tested benefit is named on the bill for the main property, they should also be eligible.

Caravans (and similar properties)

Caravans will still be generally excluded from scheme year 15. The majority of caravans (as opposed to park homes, see above) are not classed as permanent residencies and require proof of council tax from a permanent residence each year to prove that they aren’t being lived in all year round. Only caravans in a residential park can be lived in permanently, but the majority of these are fuelled either by cylinder gas and/or plugging into mains from the site, therefore will not have a direct relationship with their supplier. There may be a small number of caravans classed as permanent residences that do have a direct relationship with a supplier, where the person in residence is eligible for the discount via means test benefits and are named on the bill. However, letters will not be sent to addresses where the property is classed as a caravan. Therefore, if you are in this position, you will need to contact the WHD helpline and provide evidence that the caravan is your sole, legal residence and you are named on the electricity bill to confirm you are eligible.

Property records are removed from the data-matching process using a combination of direct analysis of the address data (for example, first lines of address) and with reference to classification codes provided within AddressBase. AddressBase is an Ordnance Survey product that provides address data in Great Britain and includes classification codes that categorise the types of addresses, allowing us to separate eligible domestic property types from non-domestic and other ineligible property types.

1. DESNZ (2025) Expanding the Warm Home Discount Scheme, 2025 to 2026: government response ↩

2. The Warm Home Discount (Amendment) Regulations 2025 ↩

3. The Warm Home Discount (England and Wales) Regulations 2022, SI 2022 No. 772 ↩

4. DESNZ (2023) Warm Home Discount: eligibility statement (England and Wales), 2023 to 2024 scheme year onward ↩

5. DESNZ (2024) Warm Home Discount: eligibility statement (England and Wales), 2024 to 2025 scheme year onward ↩

6. DESNZ (2025) Expanding the Warm Home Discount Scheme, 2025 to 2026 ↩

7. Tax credits ended on 5 April 2025 ↩

8. DESNZ (2024) Warm Home Discount: eligibility statement (England and Wales), 2024 to 2025 scheme year onward ↩

9. The Warm Home Discount (England and Wales) Regulations 2022, SI 2022 No. 772 ↩

10. The only exception is where the recipient of the benefit has a legal representative who is the account holder, because the recipient of the benefit lacks the necessary capacity to conduct their own affairs. ↩

11. Park Homes Warm Home Discount ↩