Last verified against official state sources: July 25, 2026.
Search for a heat pump rebate and you will be told, over and over, that you can get $8,000. The figure is real. It is written into federal law. But it is not a promise, and in most states it is not a number any government agency has actually published.
We checked 19 states one at a time, on each state’s own .gov site. Six of them publish $8,000 as the heat pump maximum. One publishes a different set of numbers entirely. Eight publish no heat pump figure at all. This page shows you which is which, and what each state’s own words are.
Where the $8,000 comes from
The number comes from the federal Home Electrification and Appliance Rebates program, usually shortened to HEAR. Congress funded it and the U.S. Department of Energy distributes the money, but every operational decision belongs to your state energy office: when the program opens, who administers it, what the application looks like, and in many cases what the actual rebate amounts are.
That is the whole reason the answer is different in Georgia than it is in Texas. There is no national heat pump rebate you can apply for. There are state programs funded by a federal law, and they are at wildly different stages.
Two DOE program notices issued on May 29, 2026 reshaped the rules mid-stream. Program Notice 26-1 covers the efficiency side and Program Notice 26-2 covers electrification. They removed the requirement that 40 percent of funds be reserved for low-income households and simplified how state implementation blueprints get approved. Notice 26-2 also removed fuel switching from the electrification rebate, which is the more consequential of the two changes and is covered in the update at the end of this article. What they did not do is cancel any state’s program or cut any state’s funding. If your state’s page says it is waiting on DOE, that is the approval queue those notices reset, not a cancellation.
The six states that actually publish $8,000
These states put the number on their own official pages, in their own words:
- California publishes $8,000 for single-family households at or below 80 percent of area median income, and $4,000 for households between 80 and 150 percent. Read the important caveat about California further down this page. Source: California Energy Commission.
- Florida publishes $8,000 for a heating and cooling heat pump, though the program is still described as a pilot expected to expand. Source: Florida Energy Saver Program, FDACS.
- New York publishes $8,000 for an ENERGY STAR certified heat pump serving as the primary heating source, delivered through the existing EmPower+ program. Source: NYSERDA IRA rebates FAQ.
- North Carolina publishes $8,000 for an ENERGY STAR certified electric heat pump, and has been taking applications since January 2025. Source: NC Department of Environmental Quality and the Energy Saver NC portal.
- Virginia publishes $8,000 for heating and cooling, but has not launched. Its own FAQ says the launch depends on DOE review and approval. Source: Virginia Energy.
- Arizona publishes $8,000 for an ENERGY STAR certified heat pump and $1,750 for a heat pump water heater, with the program described as aiming to start issuing rebates. Source: Arizona Governor’s Office of Resiliency.
Notice that publishing the number and paying the number are different things. Of those six, only New York and North Carolina were both publishing $8,000 and actively taking applications on the day we checked.
Colorado publishes a different set of numbers
Colorado is the one state in our check that breaks the $8,000 pattern deliberately. Its energy office publishes a tiered structure instead: $8,000 for a cold climate heat pump, $3,000 for a standard heat pump, $1,750 for a heat pump water heater, and a household cap of $14,000 across all measures. Source: Colorado Energy Office and its rebate FAQ.
If you live in Colorado and someone quotes you a flat $8,000, ask whether they mean the cold climate equipment. It is a meaningful difference in what you will actually be reimbursed.
Georgia is paying, but publishes no single heat pump maximum
Georgia has been running the most visibly active program in our check. It launched fully on March 31, 2025, and by an official press release dated April 9, 2026 the state had paid out more than $25 million to more than 1,900 households.
What Georgia does not publish is a single heat pump maximum. Its FAQ gives efficiency rebates of $2,000 to $4,000 for an individual home and up to $400,000 for multifamily properties, but no standalone heat pump number. Source: GEFA FAQ and the April 9, 2026 press release.
So Georgia is simultaneously the state most likely to actually pay you, and a state where nobody can honestly tell you the maximum in advance.
The eight states that publish no heat pump number at all
On the day we checked, these states’ own official pages gave no heat pump specific maximum. Not a range, not a cap, nothing:
- Texas SECO, Texas Comptroller
- Illinois Illinois EPA
- Michigan Michigan EGLE
- New Jersey NJ Board of Public Utilities
- Massachusetts Massachusetts DOER
- Wisconsin Wisconsin PSC Office of Energy Innovation
- Maryland Maryland Energy Administration
- Minnesota Minnesota Department of Commerce
We did not estimate. We did not carry a number over from a neighboring state. If you see a confident dollar figure attached to any of these eight, ask the person quoting it which official page it came from.
The Texas trap
Texas deserves its own warning, because the mistake is so easy to make. The Texas SECO page does contain a dollar figure: $2,000 per year. That figure is the federal 25C tax credit, which is a completely different mechanism from a HEAR rebate.
A tax credit reduces what you owe the IRS when you file, using Form 5695. A rebate is money taken off the price at the time of the work, or reimbursed to you afterward by a state program. You can potentially use both, but they are not the same thing and they do not stack into a single $8,000 discount at the counter. Texas’s own page currently says both the efficiency and electrification rebate programs are not available.
Ohio: we could not verify anything
We looked for an official Ohio .gov page stating the status, the amounts, the income thresholds, or even the responsible agency for these programs, and we did not find one. Searches on the Ohio Department of Development site returned other energy assistance programs such as LIHEAP, but no dedicated page for these rebates.
We are not going to guess on Ohio’s behalf. If you live in Ohio, calling the state energy office directly will get you a better answer than any website currently offers, including this one.
Two places where $8,000 is published and the money is already gone
This is the part almost nobody tells you, and it is the single most expensive thing to get wrong.
California. The California Energy Commission’s page states that as of February 24, 2026, these rebates for single-family home retrofits are fully reserved statewide. The published $8,000 is still on the page. The queue for single-family homes is closed. Multifamily Phase I remained open. Source: California Energy Commission.
Colorado Region 1. The Colorado Energy Office states that Region 1, the Front Range metro area, is now closed, and that household applications and project proposals submitted after April 27, 2026 for Region 1 will not be reviewed. Region 2 remained open, scheduled to run until August 1, 2026 or until funds are exhausted, whichever comes first. Source: Colorado Energy Office.
If you are in the Front Range and reading this after August 2026, check Region 2’s status before you plan around it. That deadline was days away when we verified this page.
The income lines that decide your amount
The federal structure has three tiers, and they matter more than the headline number:
- At or below 80 percent of area median income, you can generally qualify for the full rebate.
- Between 80 and 150 percent of area median income, you generally qualify for roughly half.
- Above 150 percent of area median income, you are generally not eligible for this particular rebate at all, though the 25C tax credit may still be available to you.
Only four of the states we checked publish these tiers clearly on their own pages: California, Florida, North Carolina, and Colorado. Texas, New Jersey, Michigan, Wisconsin, Maryland, Arizona, and Virginia do not lay out the same explicit percentage breakdown, so in those states you will need the administering agency to tell you where you fall.
Area median income is county specific. A household income that qualifies in one county can fail in the next county over. Do not rely on a statewide figure.
The statutory text behind those three tiers, and the reason the same $8,000 figure means two different things in the two federal programs, is set out in the income rules behind the $14,000 rebate.
If you came here because you read that the 8,000 dollar figure was a tax credit, it is not, and the tax credit that did exist ended on a date written into the statute. The Heat Pump Tax Credit Ended. The Rebate Did Not. lays out which one still applies in 2026.
Update: the 8,000 dollar ceiling survived, the eligible project did not
This article was written before the Department of Energy issued Program Notice 26-2, effective May 29, 2026. The 8,000 dollar heat pump line item is untouched in statute at 42 U.S.C. 18795a, and no state on this page has cut it. What changed is which project qualifies. The notice removed fuel switching from the program, so replacing a gas furnace with a heat pump is being phased out, and rebates are directed instead at upgrades from existing electric equipment to more efficient electric equipment. Arizona has asked applicants to apply by August 1, 2026 and Georgia stops accepting scopes of work on August 10, 2026 under the older rules. Read what the notice says and where each state now stands.
What we could not verify, stated plainly
- DOE’s own state-by-state status tracker, at the URL widely cited by third-party trackers, returned a 404 error every time we tried it. DOE’s current program page says details on active state programs are coming soon. There is no working official national status page right now.
- We declined to use third-party trackers as a source of numbers, including the well-known 50-state analyses. They may well be accurate. They are not the state’s own words, which is the standard this site holds itself to.
- Massachusetts is our least confident entry. The most recent official material we could locate was a 2024 straw proposal, not a 2026 status page. Treat Massachusetts here as stale and verify directly.
- Eight of the state pages we read carry no last-updated date at all: Texas, Florida, Michigan, Arizona, New Jersey, Oregon, Wisconsin, and Georgia’s FAQ. We recorded what those pages said on July 25, 2026, and we cannot tell you how old that text was.
How to check your own state in ten minutes
- Search for your state’s name plus energy office, and open only the result ending in .gov.
- Find the page for home energy rebates, and read the status sentence before you read any dollar amount.
- Check whether the page distinguishes the efficiency program from the electrification program. They open on different schedules and pay for different things.
- Look for a last-updated date. If there is not one, assume the page may be months behind.
- Confirm the income tier that applies to your county, not your state.
- Then, and only then, talk to a contractor about the equipment.
If your state is not open yet, there is nothing to apply for, and any company telling you otherwise is selling something.
For more on where these figures come from and how we handle numbers that agencies have not published, see How We Source Our Data. For the full state-by-state status picture, including which states are open and which are only piloting, see Home Energy Rebates by State. Our business model is described in full on How We Get Paid.
Updated July 29, 2026: we opened the official rebate page for twenty-four states to see which ones have told homeowners that the rule changed. Only six mention it, and six more are open and still publishing the old rule.