New boiler cost · key figures (2026)
How much does a new boiler cost in 2026?
Here is the honest headline. A like-for-like combi swap costs £1,800 to £3,200 fitted. A system or conventional boiler lands in a similar range. Switching boiler type, or moving it to a new spot, adds £500 to £1,200. An air source heat pump is a different order of cost, £8,000 to £14,000, but a £7,500 government grant closes most of that gap.
Those ranges are wide for a reason, and the reason is the whole point of this guide. The boiler unit is only 35 to 45% of the bill. Everything else is labour, and labour is the number that swings by a thousand pounds between two engineers quoting the identical job. Understand how that price is built and you stop overpaying, before you even reach for a grant.
The belief that costs people the most
Most people treat a new boiler like a fixed-price product: they look up "what does a Worcester combi cost", find a number, and assume that is roughly the bill. It is not. A new boiler is a service with a product bolted on, and the service is priced by your installer's order book, not by a price list.
That single misunderstanding, treating the quote as a fixed price rather than an opening offer, is what makes UK households overpay by hundreds of pounds. The price is negotiable, comparable and, for many people, partly or fully covered by a grant. None of that is visible if you stop at the first quote.
Why most "new boiler cost" guides get it wrong
Search the term and look at who ranks: boiler manufacturers and installation companies. That matters, because their goal is not to tell you the cheapest route, it is to capture your details and book the install. So the typical guide does three things that quietly work against you:
- ✓It leads with a "from £X" anchor that almost nobody actually pays, then routes you to a quote form;
- ✓It presents one company's pricing as the market price, hiding the £1,000-plus spread between installers;
- ✓It barely mentions grants, because a free ECO4 boiler or a £7,500 heat pump grant means a smaller margin for them.
The genuinely useful version of this page does the opposite: it shows you how the price is built, where the spread hides, and which grant could erase part of it. That is what the calculator below is for.
What will your new boiler actually cost?
Pick what you are installing and tell us your situation. We estimate the fitted price, then show the grants that could cut it, sometimes to nothing.
Estimated fitted price
Tick a box on the left if it applies, or consider a heat pump to see the grants you could claim.
Estimate only. Grant eligibility is confirmed by your supplier (ECO4) or installer (BUS), not by this tool.
Pricing verified June 2026 from UK Gas Safe installer rates and manufacturer RRPs. Grants reflect the live BUS and ECO4 rules.
How installer pricing actually works
To use the numbers well, you need to know what they are made of. A fitted boiler price has four parts, and only one of them is fixed:
- 1.The unit (35 to 45% of the bill). Roughly fixed, you can look up the RRP. A mid-range combi is £1,300 to £1,800.
- 2.Labour (the big variable). One to two days of a Gas Safe engineer. This is where the spread lives, a busy national chain prices its time far above a local installer.
- 3.Extras: a system flush, a filter, new pipework if you change type, scaffolding for a flue. Each is a line item, and each is where padding hides.
- 4.Margin and overhead: showrooms, sales staff, advertising and finance. You pay for the way a company is built, not just the work done in your home.
This is why a "from £1,795" headline and a real bill of £3,200 are both true at the same time. The headline prices the cheapest unit with the simplest labour. Your home rarely matches that, and the company knows it.
New boiler cost by type and tier (2026)
Use this to sanity-check any quote. A line priced well above the fitted range here is your cue to ask for a written breakdown of labour and extras.
| Boiler type | Tier | Unit only | Typical fitted price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Combi boiler | Budget (Ideal, Baxi entry) | £900 to £1,300 | £1,800 to £2,500 |
| Combi boilerMost common | Mid-range (Worcester, Vaillant) | £1,300 to £1,800 | £2,300 to £3,200 |
| Combi boiler | Premium (Viessmann, top Worcester) | £1,800 to £2,400 | £3,000 to £4,000 |
| System boiler | Mid-range | £1,200 to £1,700 | £2,200 to £3,200 |
| Conventional (regular) | Mid-range | £1,000 to £1,500 | £2,000 to £3,000 |
| Air source heat pump | Swap from gas | £6,000 to £10,000 | £8,000 to £14,000 (£7,500 grant) |
Heat pump figure shown before the £7,500 Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant. Add £500 to £1,200 for changing boiler type or relocation. Verified June 2026.
Where households quietly overpay
Put the pricing structure together with how people actually buy, and the traps become obvious. The classic one is the single-quote install: the old boiler dies in winter, the first engineer who can come quotes £3,400, and the household says yes because they want heat back. A second and third quote would very likely have landed near £2,400. That is £1,000 lost to urgency.
The second trap is buying brand as if it were efficiency. A premium boiler does not heat your home for less than a mid-range one, both are A-rated and both hit roughly 94% efficiency. The premium price buys a longer warranty and quieter operation, which can be worth it, but not on the basis that it will cut your bills.
The third, and most expensive, is paying full price while sitting on an unclaimed grant. A household on Universal Credit with a 15-year-old boiler in a band-E home may qualify for a fully funded replacement under ECO4, yet pay £2,800 because nobody told them to check first.
The insider view: two prices, one job
Here is the part the installer-owned guides will never put in writing. For the exact same combi swap, in the exact same house, there are effectively two prices in the market at once: the convenience price and the competitive price. The convenience price is what you pay the first company that picks up the phone in a cold snap. The competitive price is what you pay when three Gas Safe engineers know they are bidding against each other. The gap is routinely £1,000 to £1,500, for identical work.
The grant shift nobody explains ECO4, the "free boiler" scheme, has quietly changed what it funds. It increasingly pays for heat pumps and insulation rather than straight gas-boiler swaps, and straightforward broken-boiler replacements are capped at £5,000. So "free boiler" in 2026 often really means "free heat pump or insulation if your home qualifies". If a company promises a free gas boiler with no eligibility check, treat it as a sales hook, not a grant.
The practical takeaway is unusual: your biggest saving is rarely the discount you negotiate. It is the quote you get before you commit and the grant you check before you pay. Both are free. Both are skipped by most households.
What to actually do
Check a grant before anything
If anyone in the home is on a means-tested benefit, run an ECO4 check first. A funded replacement makes every quote irrelevant.
Get three written quotes
Always Gas Safe registered, ideally local. Insist on a fixed price with a labour and extras breakdown, not "from £X".
Match the boiler to the home
Right size, A-rated, mid-range brand. Use the size calculator to check the kW the quote specifies is not oversized.
Compare warranties, not badges
A 10 to 12 year warranty (with the annual service kept up) is worth more than a premium logo. That is the figure that varies.
The bottom line
A new boiler costs £1,800 to £3,200 fitted for most UK homes, but the figure you pay is set by two things the cost guides ignore: how many quotes you gathered, and whether you checked for a grant. The unit on the wall is nearly a commodity. The price is not. Treat the first quote as an opening offer, check ECO4 and the £7,500 heat pump grant before you sign, and the same boiler can cost you a thousand pounds less, or nothing at all.
New boiler FAQ
The Selectra expert answers your questions
A like-for-like combi swap costs £1,800 to £3,200 fitted, depending on the brand tier and your region. Changing boiler type (for example conventional to combi, or moving the boiler) adds £500 to £1,200 for pipework and disposal. An air source heat pump runs £8,000 to £14,000 before the £7,500 Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant.
Because the unit itself is only 35 to 45% of the bill. The rest is labour, and labour is priced by how busy the installer is, not by how long the job takes. A national chain carries overheads a local Gas Safe engineer does not, so the same combi swap can be quoted at £2,200 by one and £3,700 by another. Three written quotes routinely uncover a £1,000 to £1,500 spread.
Possibly, through the Energy Company Obligation (ECO4), which runs to 31 December 2026. It funds heating upgrades for households on means-tested benefits in the least efficient homes (EPC bands D to G). Note the shift: ECO4 increasingly funds heat pumps and insulation rather than straight gas-boiler swaps, and broken-boiler replacements are capped at £5,000. Check eligibility before paying for anything. See the free boiler scheme guide.
If the boiler is under 10 years old with a single cheap fault, repair. If it is 12+ years old and the repair is more than half the price of a new unit, replacement usually pays back inside five years once you count the gas an A-rated boiler saves. Our repair or replace calculator does the five-year maths for your numbers.
Only up to a point. The jump from an old G-rated boiler to any modern A-rated unit captures almost all the efficiency saving, roughly £200 to £400 a year on gas. Paying £1,500 more for a premium brand buys a longer warranty and quieter running, not meaningfully lower bills. The warranty length, not the headline price, is the figure worth comparing.
An oversized boiler costs more to buy and runs less efficiently by short-cycling. Most UK homes need 24 to 30 kW for a combi. Getting the sizing right is the single biggest spec decision, our boiler size calculator gives you a kW figure to check any quote against.