What Irish homeowners actually paid for their retrofit

The number nobody publishes

SEAI publishes homeowner case studies. Every one of them gives you a BER band before, a BER band after, and often a savings percentage. Not one of the five we read gives a cost, a grant amount or a net contribution. Installer case studies do the same. One One Stop Shop page publishes a €9,325 grant with no cost printed beside it, which tells you nothing at all about what the household paid.

That is the gap this page fills. Every euro figure below for what a household actually handed over came from a journalist who asked, or from a person on a forum who posted their own quote. None of it came from an official or a commercial source, and that is a finding in itself.

We also want to be straight with you about a change. Until February 2026 the honest answer to "what does the grant really cover" was around a fifth to a quarter of the bill. On 3 February 2026 the grants went up, and the heat pump grant nearly doubled. SEAI's own data for the first half of 2026 now puts median One Stop Shop grant coverage at about 38 per cent. That is a lot better than it was. It is still not the 50 per cent the scheme was launched on. Both things are true and we set out both below.

What the grant actually covers, in per cent

Take SEAI's own published medians for 583 private homes completed through One Stop Shops between January and June 2026. A semi-detached job cost €62,881, attracted €23,880 of grant, and left the homeowner €37,816. That is 38 per cent covered. Detached: €66,304 works, €25,975 grant, €40,835 to pay, 39 per cent. Mid terrace: €52,099, €20,300, €32,238, also 39 per cent. Apartments are the outlier at €20,638 works, €10,300 grant, €10,338 to pay, which is a genuine 50 per cent.

Now take the quotes real people posted before those increases landed. Nine independently sourced One Stop Shop quotes from 2023 to 2025 cluster between 19.7 and 29.9 per cent grant coverage. The itemised 220 sq m dormer quote: €102,866 of works, €22,100 of grant, 21.5 per cent. The 1970s semi with an extension: €137,000, €27,000, 19.7 per cent. The best of them, an itemised quote on a 1970s four bed semi, reached 29.9 per cent. Not one household in the whole evidence base reported anything close to half.

The individual measures are more mixed, and worth knowing before you assume the worst. On SEAI's 2026 medians, cavity wall insulation on a detached house costs €2,350 against an €1,800 grant, which is 77 per cent. Attic insulation costs €2,700 against €2,000, which is 74 per cent. External wall insulation on a detached house costs €26,500 against €8,000, which is 30 per cent. Solar PV costs €11,100 against a capped €1,800, which is 16 per cent. The cheap measures are heavily supported. The expensive ones are not.

Where the 50 per cent claim came from, and where it went

The National Home Energy Upgrade Scheme was announced in 2022 with "grant levels of up to 50% of the cost of a home energy retrofit to a B BER standard". SEAI's blog illustrated it with a semi-detached home going from E to B2 for "approximately €30k" with a grant of €15.5k. That blog post is still live today.

Hold that worked example beside SEAI's own 2026 completion data. The median semi-detached One Stop Shop job is €62,881, not €30,000. It is twice the size of the illustration. The grant is €23,880, not €15,500. So the grant is bigger in euro and smaller in share, because the job turned out to be far larger than anyone advertised.

SEAI's current One Stop Shop page has quietly dropped the percentage. It now sets out fixed euro amounts per measure and says the One Stop Shop will discount the grants from the invoice. No percentage claim appears on it at all. That is the more honest way to describe it, and it is how we describe it too. Your grant is a fixed sum per measure and per house type. It does not move when your quote moves.

February 2026 changed the arithmetic, and most of what you will read online predates it

From 3 February 2026 the heat pump system grant became a fixed €12,500 for a house. That is €6,500 for the heat pump, €2,000 for radiators and pipework, and a new €4,000 renewable heating bonus for coming off fossil or solid fuel. It was €6,500 before. Attic and cavity grants also went up. From 2 March 2026 a windows and doors grant was introduced on the individual route, first time buyers got a higher attic grant, people on qualifying welfare payments got higher attic and cavity grants, and a second wall insulation measure became claimable if you had already taken one.

This matters when you read forum threads. Almost every quote in our evidence base was priced against the old table. Take the itemised 1970s four bed semi quoted at €67,000 with €20,000 of grant in 2023. The same scope today, with a €18,000 heat pump line in it, would attract roughly €6,000 more. That moves it from 29.9 per cent to around 39 per cent, which is exactly where SEAI's 2026 medians sit.

So do not take a 2023 net figure off a forum and treat it as your number. Take the gross cost, which is the part that has not fallen, and apply the 2026 grant table to it yourself. You can do that on our grant calculator.

The €44,000 spread. Two registered One Stop Shops, one assessment report

A homeowner with a 240 sq m dormer built in 2005 had one technical assessment carried out and sent the identical report to two SEAI registered One Stop Shops. The first came back at €102,000 net, with €19,100 of grants applied. The second came back at €58,000 net, with €22,400 of grants applied. Same house. Same report. Same scheme. A €44,000 spread, and the cheaper quote also captured €3,300 more grant.

His own reaction, posted at the time, was "How can this be? It's all based on the same report!" We have no way to verify which quote was reasonable and which was not, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What the case proves is narrower and more useful. Registration with SEAI is a quality and eligibility gate. It is not a price gate. Nothing in the system compares your quote to anybody else's.

That is one anonymous forum account, so treat it as one data point. It is not the only one. Another homeowner was told €66,000 net by a One Stop Shop's own online estimator and then quoted €118,500. Another was quoted €31,000 ex VAT for an external wrap that direct contractors were pricing verbally at €18,000. Another priced a package of windows, 3.5 kW of solar, a gas boiler, attic and cavity at €50,000 net through a One Stop Shop, against €30,000 to €35,000 going contractor by contractor. Another was quoted €134,000 after grants on a 110 sq m dormer, with the external insulation line alone at about €80,000, while other posters priced the same scope at about €90,000 gross.

What sits inside the price, and why bundles cost more

The One Stop Shop route buys you one contract, one point of contact, and grants netted off your invoice instead of claimed back. That has real value if you are working full time and cannot chase six trades. You pay for it. Project management fees of €7,000 and €8,000 appear repeatedly in the quotes we collected, and SEAI itself grant aids a project management line worth up to €2,000 on a detached house.

The individual grant route is cheaper on paper and much more work for you. You pick each contractor from the SEAI register, you claim each grant, you sequence the measures yourself, and if your target is a B rating with a heat pump you carry the risk of getting the order wrong. Several people in our evidence base did exactly that and were happy. One did it over six years and posted "I would NEVER do it again."

There is a third route people rarely talk about, which is to take no grants at all. A homeowner in Co Galway did attic insulation at €1,400, a composite front door at €1,500, a triple glazed back window at €600, an insulated sun room ceiling at €2,300 and a wood pellet stove at €9,900. €15,700 all in, no grants, no registered contractor requirement, no BER prerequisite. A climate policy researcher in Waterford went the same way on most of her project, because her trusted builder is not SEAI registered and because the heat pump grant requires a good BER first, meaning tens of thousands of euro of prerequisite work before any renewable heat.

The costs that never appear in the headline number

The technical assessment fee, paid before you decide anything. One itemised quote carried €775 for it. One One Stop Shop charges €725 for its home energy report. SEAI grant aids €200 towards a technical assessment, but only alongside a heat pump grant.

The work that is not an energy upgrade but has to happen first. The Dublin 8 homeowner found the wiring was so old the entire house had to be rewired before retrofit could begin. Pebble dash and granite finishes have to come off before an external wrap and go back on after. Micro-bore pipework has to be replaced before a heat pump will work properly.

The lines the grant does not reach at all. In the fully itemised 220 sq m dormer quote, sloped ceiling upgrades came to €16,193 with no grant against them. The stove, the vents and the extract fans attracted nothing. The BER certificate at €650.88 attracted nothing.

And the things that never show up as a line item. The Cork couple had to move out and live with her parents while the work was done. The Dublin 8 homeowner lost the corner of a bedroom she used as an office, because the new cylinder and plumbing did not fit the space allowed for them.

What people actually paid, sorted by size of job

SEAI's 2026 One Stop Shop data also publishes the spread, not just the middle, and the spread is the part worth reading. Of the 583 private homes completed in the first half of 2026, 38 per cent had works costing over €75,000. Another 32 per cent landed between €50,000 and €75,000. Twenty three per cent were €30,000 to €50,000. Only 7 per cent came in under €30,000.

In other words, seven jobs in ten cost more than €50,000 before grants, and the €30,000 figure used in the 2022 worked example describes fewer than one job in fourteen.

The 2024 dataset published by Electric Ireland Superhomes, covering 402 private homes, lines up with this almost exactly: semi-detached €61,730 of works, €20,700 of grant, €41,030 to the homeowner. Three separate datasets from three separate years all put a semi-detached deep retrofit in the low sixties before grants. When a builder tells you thirty, ask what is not in it.

Payback, honestly

We found exactly one account with metered consumption before and after. A 1930s three bed terrace taken to A2 saw gas fall from 5,000 to 6,000 kWh a year down to about 600 kWh for cooking only, and electricity rise from about 1,000 kWh to between 2,200 and 2,600 kWh. His verdict was blunt. "It will never pay for itself in terms of reducing bills." He also said the house is far more comfortable.

The measured savings we could find are modest against the capital. A Dublin homeowner spent €14,000 net on 150mm of external insulation and an attic top up and saves about €600 a year in oil, which is a payback of over twenty years on his own figures. A bungalow owner spent €10,000 net on external insulation in 2012 and reports €6,000 saved over five years, about €1,200 a year, which is closer to eight years and is one of very few multi year measured savings anywhere online.

The fast paybacks all come from solar, and all from households with an electric car. One 5.78 kWp array with a battery and a diverter, at €8,800, estimates break even in about two and a half years, and that only works because the household drives 25,000 km a year on electricity it generates. Strip the car out and the same array is a ten year proposition.

Almost every genuinely happy homeowner in this file talks about comfort, mould gone, storms not being audible, a kitchen that used to be an icebox. Almost none of them defends the spend on financial payback. If you are deciding on payback alone, the numbers here will probably talk you out of it. If you are deciding on how the house feels in February, they will not.

A BER band is not a temperature

The BER is the currency the entire grant system runs on. Your eligibility, your heat pump prerequisite and your One Stop Shop target are all expressed in bands. It is worth knowing how much judgement sits inside that number.

A homeowner in north Co Dublin expected a B after his upgrade and got a D. The first assessor had recorded his wall insulation at half its actual thickness and left the underfloor heating out entirely. He hired a second assessor and had the contractor attend with sensors. The rating moved two bands with no additional physical work done to the house. A homeowner in Co Cork was scored C1 rather than a likely B3 purely because her insulation could not be verified without opening up walls.

It runs the other way too. A homeowner south of Arklow received an external wrap through the free scheme and moved from E to D. He felt no difference in warmth and no difference in his heating bills, because his heat is leaving through wall to ceiling sea view windows whose seals have failed. He cannot get a windows grant because his walls are rated "fair" and need to be "good" to qualify. His comment on the whole thing was "I'd be very disappointed if I'd spent €30,000."

Note that the BER scale itself changed on 24 May 2026. The subdivisions are gone. It is now A0, A, B, C, D, E, F and G, and the One Stop Shop target is a B rather than a B2. Certificates issued before that date stay valid for ten years, which is why the historical cases on this page still show ratings like B3, C1 and A3. Those are the ratings the sources actually used, on the old scale.

The free scheme, and what it is like to wait for it

If you are on a qualifying welfare payment, the Warmer Homes Scheme does the work at no cost to you. It is the right answer for the households it covers and it is genuinely transformative when it lands well. Twenty four homes for older residents at Wolfe Tone Court in Mountmellick were brought to A1 with triple glazing, composite doors, ventilation, attic insulation, heat pumps and solar, at about €39,600 a home across a €950,000 programme. One resident, aged 86, put it as "We are very happy, warm and snug in our beds now."

The waiting is the problem. There were 45,000 applications between January 2022 and September 2025. In 2025 the wait ran about 14 months to survey and a further 10 to 12 months to works, so 21 to 22 months end to end, worse than the 18 months recorded in 2024. In 2024 the scheme upgraded 7,743 homes at an average cost of €27,411, of which 49 got heat pumps and 1,989 got high efficiency boilers.

One applicant, acting for his 90 year old mother, was accepted around early 2020 and had a contractor allocated around early 2022. Vents and a condensing boiler went in. The windows, insulation and dry lining stalled because, in his account, "the prices being charged by sub-contractors would appear to be far greater than the amount SEAI allocate." And in a case that reached the Ombudsman, a Donegal woman's approved contractor went out of business mid job, after which SEAI recorded that her home already had insulation and refused a re-inspection under its One Home Visit Policy. Only after the Ombudsman intervened did SEAI re-inspect, find there was no cavity insulation at all, and finish the work.

If you think you might qualify, apply anyway and apply now. The queue only gets longer. Details on the Warmer Homes scheme.

How to use these numbers when your own quote arrives

Ask for the gross cost, not the net. Every quote in this file that looked reasonable turned out to be a net figure with the grant already deducted, and every quote that looked terrifying turned out to be gross. You cannot compare two quotes until both are expressed the same way. Ask for cost per measure, grant per measure, and the total ex VAT and inc VAT.

Work out your own price per unit. For external insulation, measure your wall area: perimeter times wall height, minus windows and doors. Divide the quote by it. The documented cases run from about €200 to €302 per square metre of wall. For solar, divide by kWp. The documented cases run from €1,273 to €2,823 per kWp net, and the expensive end is always the small array.

Get three quotes and expect them to disagree by more than you think is possible. The €44,000 spread above came from two registered providers reading the same report. SEAI's advice to get three quotes is sound, but nothing in the public messaging prepares you for spreads of that size, and registered status does not narrow them.

Check what is excluded before you sign. Scaffolding, making good, removing and reinstating render, sloped ceilings, vents, extract fans, the BER certificate, the assessment fee, and any electrical work needed before a heat pump. Ask in writing what happens to the price if the assessor finds something behind the wall.

Then price the grants yourself rather than trusting the deduction on the invoice. The 2026 amounts are fixed and public. Run your measures through the grant calculator, or read them measure by measure on our grants pages.

How we compiled this

Sixty one Irish households, every one of them traceable to a URL. The split is 28 forum accounts, 21 news reports, 5 SEAI case studies, 4 from regional energy agencies and 3 installer marketing pages. Forty seven of the 61 carry both a grant figure and a cost figure. The official 2026 medians quoted here come from two SEAI publications: 23,412 individual upgrades and 583 One Stop Shop homes, all completed January to June 2026.

We kept anonymous forum accounts and labelled them anonymous, because a person posting their own itemised quote to strangers has no obvious reason to inflate it and every reason to be accurate. We kept installer and One Stop Shop material and labelled it marketing. We did not average across those categories, and where a source published a BER jump but no money, we recorded that the money was withheld rather than filling it in with an estimate.

Nine of the strongest looking case studies, including all five published by SEAI and all three installer pages, disclose no cost, no grant and no net figure. If you know of an Irish household that has published all three, or you are one, we would like to add it.

Where these figures come from

• seai.ie/sites/default/files/grants/home-energy-grants/one-stop-shop/SEAI-OSS-M
• seai.ie/sites/default/files/publications/Median-costs-of-individual-energy-upg
• seai.ie/blog/grant-questions-answered
• seai.ie/grants/home-energy-grants/one-stop-shop/multiple-energy-upgrades
• seai.ie/news-and-events/news/increased-grant-amounts-for-homeowners
• seai.ie/ber/new-simplified-scale
• irishtimes.com/property/interiors/2025/01/26/diary-of-a-retrofit-it-cost-60000
• irishtimes.com/life-style/people/2026/04/05/irelands-retrofit-gap-from-amazing

Checked against the official pages on 27 August 2026. Grant terms change, so confirm current amounts with SEAI or your installer before you commit.