So you want to carry out home improvements that will make your home more energy efficient, whether it is adding new insulation, replacing doors and windows, or installing solar panels.

All of these make excellent investments that can save you huge amounts of money on electricity and heating in the long run. The only problem is that they can be very expensive up front. 

There’s no point talking about how insulation or solar panels will pay for themselves many times over if you don’t have the cash on hand to get them in the first place.

The answer to this is to get a loan, which will cover the cost of getting your home upgrade works done. There are a number of ways to get home improvement loans, but interest rates of 7% – 10%, or more, can significantly extend the payback period for home improvements.

The Home Energy Upgrade Loan Scheme is the government’s answer to this. Through this scheme, homeowners can borrow up to €75,000 at interest rates as low as 3% APR in order to finance works that will make their homes more energy efficient.

The Home Energy Upgrade Loan scheme was launched in 2024 with a budget of €500 million to encourage homeowners to carry out retrofit projects.

This is to help meet the target, introduced in 2020, or retrofitting 500,000 homes to a BER of B2 or greater by 2030.

It aims to achieve by using government subsidies for the scheme to allow homeowners to borrow at greatly reduced interest rates compared with standard commercial loans.

The main financial features of the HEUL scheme are:

The scheme also sets a number of criterial for how the upgrades works can be carried out.

There are strict controls on what sort of home improvement works you can carry out with funds from the Home Energy Upgrade Loan Scheme. The main restriction is that the works must also be funded by a grant from the SEAI.

The eligible works are further restricted by which scheme of the SEAI’s you are using to get the upgrade works done.

If you are applying for individual energy upgrades, the scheme only supports wall and roof insulation, a heat pump, heating controls, and solar thermal panels.

There are far more upgrades available of applying under the One Stop Shop of Community Grant schemes.

To qualify for a Home Energy Upgrade Loan you must be:

The property must also be located in the country. It can be your primary residence or a home you rent out.

1. Contact and SEAI One Stop Shop or Community Pproject Co-ordinator to plan your upgrade project.
2. Get a BER on your home if it does not already have one. This is necessary to see how much the planned upgrade works will improve its performance.
3. Determine how much the upgrade works will cost to see what size loan you will need.
4. Get a Home Energy Summary Report from the One Stop Shop of Community Project Coordinator outlining the proposed works.
5. Apply for a low-cost loan with one of the finance providers participating in the scheme.

There are currently 11 banks and credit unions signed up for the scheme for people to borrow from. They are:

Interest rates for the Home Energy Upgrade Loan Scheme vary by provider, but are typically lower than what is offered for a personal loan or home improvement loan not part of the scheme. 

Interest rates currently on offer for the HEUL scheme start from:

You cannot borrow under the Home Energy Upgrade Loan Scheme just to install solar panels, but that doesn’t mean that you cannot get them at all.

There are two ways to buy solar panels with money from a loan under this scheme:

1. Get solar panels as part of a complete home retrofit under the SEAI’s National Home Energy Upgrade Scheme, also known as the One Stop Shop service.
2. If getting a loan for individual upgrades under the Better Energy Homes Scheme, you can use up to 25% of the loan for works which are not supported, such as solar panels.

There are some caveats to this. With the One Stop Shop service, you are getting a larger retrofit, and the project must bring the home up to at least a B2 BER under the requirements of that programme. This means that you may have to carry out a lot of other work, even if you only want solar panels.

For people getting individual energy upgrades, you are only allowed to use 25% of the amount you borrow for non-support works such as solar panels. This means that if a solar PV system would cost €10,000, then you would have to borrow €40,000 to cover that cost.

Either way, you won’t be able to only get solar panels under this loan scheme.