How Britain heats its homes: the gas heartlands, the oil-fired countryside, and the places switching to heat pumps

The gas heartlands

Mains gas dominates everywhere, but it is heaviest in the North and the South Wales valleys. The North East is the most gas-dependent region, with 89.2% of homes on a gas boiler. The North West and Yorkshire follow at about 85%. These are densely built, terraced, ex-industrial areas where the gas network reached almost every door decades ago.

In Houghton and Sunderland South, 97.5% of homes burn mains gas. For these areas the heating transition is a story about replacing a near-universal gas boiler with something else, at scale, in homes that are often older and harder to insulate. The gas grid is not the obstacle. The cost and disruption of swapping millions of working boilers is.

Off the gas grid: the oil-fired countryside

The opposite problem sits in rural Britain. Where the gas network never reached, homes run on oil, LPG or electricity. Oil heating is concentrated in a clear set of places: rural Wales, mid and north Norfolk, the Welsh Marches and the South West peninsula.

In Caerfyrddin, 35.7% of homes are heated by oil. In Ceredigion Preseli the figure is 34.1%. These households face a different transition from the gas heartlands. They have no gas boiler to replace, and oil is both expensive and exposed to global price swings. For them, the case for switching away from fossil heating is partly economic already.

The heat-pump map: adoption follows the oil

Here is the most useful pattern in the data. Heat-pump adoption is not happening where the policy debate is loudest. It is happening where it makes the most immediate sense: off the gas grid, where the alternative is expensive oil.

At the other end of the heat-pump table sit the big urban centres. In a string of West Midlands constituencies, including West Bromwich, Tipton and Wednesbury, and several Birmingham seats, heat-pump adoption rounds to 0.1%. The same near-zero figure shows up in Birkenhead, Blackpool and Plymouth. These are dense, gas-heated, lower-income areas where the upfront cost of a heat pump is hardest to justify and flats make installation awkward.

So the heating transition splits into two very different jobs. In the off-grid countryside it is already under way, driven by the cost of oil. In the gas-heated cities it has barely begun, and that is where the millions of boiler replacements will have to come from.

What this means

For policy, the easy wins and the hard ones are in different places. Rural off-grid homes are switching on their own economics. The harder task is the gas-heated urban terrace, where there is a working boiler, a tight budget and often a flat.

For buyers, the heating system is a future cost. An oil or LPG boiler in a rural home, or an old gas boiler in a city flat, is a bill you will inherit. The certificate records the system, and a Move Insights report surfaces the EPC and heating details for any address before you offer.

For the wider efficiency picture, heating fuel sits alongside the energy rating. We looked at how energy efficiency feeds through to price in our green premium study, which found efficient homes command a clear price premium in the North and none in the expensive South.

Methodology

Source data: the Energy Performance Certificate register for England and Wales, covering 23.4 million domestic certificates lodged between 2012 and mid-2026.

Fuel categories: the certificate records a free-text main heating fuel. We grouped these into mains gas, electricity, oil, LPG and solid fuel using consistent keyword matching across the old and new certificate formats. Heat-pump adoption is measured separately from the main heating system description, because a heat pump runs on electricity and would otherwise be counted as an electric home.

Geography: region and parliamentary constituency are taken from the certificate's own fields. Constituency rankings include only seats with at least 2,000 certificates.

Caveats: a certificate exists for a home only if it has been sold, let or built since 2008, roughly 60% of the stock. Long-held homes are under-represented, and those skew older and more fossil-dependent, so the true gas and oil dependence may be slightly higher than these figures show. A home may also have changed its heating system since its last certificate. The figures describe certificates, not a live census of every dwelling.