Rural landlords face £8,900 bigger EPC bill than urban owners
Savills research reported by Property118 finds rural rental homes cost far more to bring up to EPC C — here's what that means for insulation and heating costs.
Bringing a rural rental property below EPC C up to that standard costs an average of £24,200 — £8,900 more than the equivalent job on an urban home — according to Property118, reporting research from estate agency Savills.
What Savills found
The gap comes down to a mix of harder-to-treat housing stock and worse starting points. Savills found that 67% of the rural homes in its analysis have no mains gas, and three-quarters sit below EPC C under current metrics, against 58% of urban houses. Moving a rural property from EPC D to C cost an average of £13,000, compared with £10,600 in urban areas; starting from G pushed the bill to £33,600 in the countryside against £16,300 in towns and cities — more than double.
Savills attributes 61% of the rural premium to higher costs for equivalent starting ratings, with the rest down to rural stock being concentrated in poorer EPC bands to begin with. Scaled up, the firm estimates that bringing every private rented home below standard up to compliance across England and Wales could cost £27.8 billion at the midpoint, or £37.3 billion in the worst case — with rural homes making up 15.8% of the properties affected but 22.9% of that bill, around £6.4 billion.
Separately, 79% of estate managers surveyed by Savills expect the main effect of tighter minimum energy efficiency standards to be owners selling off their weakest-performing homes rather than upgrading them. Savills associate director Joe Lloyd put it plainly: landlords should "act early to understand the scale of exposure across their portfolios" and look at funding routes including the Boiler Upgrade Scheme.
What this means for the cost of the work
For a rural landlord or homeowner off the gas grid, the two projects doing most of the heavy lifting on an EPC rating are usually insulation and heating.
External wall insulation on a typical solid-wall property runs to around £26,000 for a mid-range job, with a full range of £20,300 – £33,800 depending on insulation type and thickness — see
| Material | Typical | Usual range | Lifespan |
|---|---|---|---|
| EPS polystyrene | £26,000 | £20,300 – £33,800 | 30-50 years |
| PIR | £26,100 | £20,300 – £33,900 | 30-50 years |
| Mineral / rock wool (non-combustible) | £30,500 | £23,800 – £39,700 | 40-60 years |
| Phenolic (thinner for the same performance) | £31,400 | £24,500 – £40,800 | 30-50 years |
for how EPS, mineral wool, phenolic and PIR compare on cost and performance. External wall insulation has the full breakdown by wall type and finish.
Heating is the other big lever, especially for the 67% of rural homes with no mains gas that Savills points to. An air source heat pump typically costs £12,900, with a range of £10,100 – £16,800. The Boiler Upgrade Scheme currently takes £7,500 off that bill in England and Wales, provided the installer is MCS certified; in Scotland, the Home Energy Scotland grant offers up to £7,500 plus an optional £7,500 interest-free loan. On top of that, installing a heat pump or insulation currently qualifies for 0% VAT on the work until 31 March 2027, which is a meaningful saving on jobs of this size. The government's Warm Homes Plan, published in January 2026, has also earmarked £15 billion of funding to 2030, including grants for low-income households and low- or zero-interest loans that are being phased in — worth checking eligibility against before budgeting a big retrofit.
Where a property does have mains gas and a straightforward boiler swap is enough to hold the EPC rating steady while other work goes in, a new boiler typically costs £2,800, range £2,200 – £3,650 — see
| Material | Typical | Usual range | Lifespan |
|---|---|---|---|
| Combi boiler (like-for-like) | £2,800 | £2,200 – £3,650 | 12-15 years |
| Regular (heat-only) boiler, tanks kept | £2,800 | £2,200 – £3,650 | 12-15 years |
| System boiler (existing cylinder kept) | £3,050 | £2,400 – £4,000 | 12-15 years |
| Convert regular or system to combi | £3,800 | £2,950 – £4,950 | 12-15 years |
for the difference between combi, system and regular options.
Why the rural gap is real
Our own cost model reflects the same pattern Savills describes: rural jobs tend to run at the higher end of the range because of longer scaffolding runs on detached and semi-detached houses, more complex wall junctions, and heat pumps needing to work harder against greater heat loss and, often, worse existing insulation. We build our figures from labour hours multiplied by local rates plus materials, then check them against market prices and real quotes, which is why the ranges above are wide enough to cover both a compact terrace and a large detached rural property.
If you've had a quote in hand and want a second opinion before committing, it's worth running it past our "is my quote fair" tool — it flags where a price looks out of step with what similar jobs are costing elsewhere in the country. Given how much wider the rural cost spread is, that check matters more the further you are from a city.