The federal tax credit that helped pay for heat pumps is gone. The federal rebate that helps pay for heat pumps is not. Those are two different programs, created by two different laws, and in 2026 only one of them can still put money in your hand.
That distinction is the most misunderstood thing in this subject, and the confusion is not the reader’s fault. On the day we checked, the first page of Google results for “is the heat pump tax credit still available 2026” contained pages published in March and April of 2026 – months after the credit had already ended – telling homeowners the credit runs through 2032 and walking them step by step through claiming it on a 2026 return.
Last verified against official sources: July 29, 2026. Nothing here is tax advice. It is a record of what the statute, the IRS and the Congressional Budget Office actually published, with the dates we read them.
The credit ended on a specific day, and the statute says so in one sentence
The Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit lives at 26 U.S.C. 25C. Its final subsection now reads, in full: “This section shall not apply with respect to any property placed in service after December 31, 2025.”
The Residential Clean Energy Credit, at 26 U.S.C. 25D, the one that covered solar, battery storage and geothermal heat pumps at 30 percent with no dollar cap, now carries the matching sentence: “The credit allowed under this section shall not apply with respect to any expenditures made after December 31, 2025.”
Both terminations were written by Public Law 119-21, signed July 4, 2025. You can read the current text of 26 U.S.C. 25C and 26 U.S.C. 25D yourself. The termination sentence is the last thing on each page.
The IRS said the same thing in its own words in fact sheet FS-2025-05, dated August 21, 2025: “The credit will not be allowed for any property placed in service after December 31, 2025” for section 25C, and “The credit will not be allowed for any expenditures made after December 31, 2025” for section 25D.
The trap is the word “paid”
A great many contractor pages told homeowners that to qualify, the job had to be “completed and paid for” by December 31, 2025. Half of that is wrong, and it is the half that costs people money.
For section 25D the IRS answered this directly in the same fact sheet, quoting the statute: “Section 25D(e)(8)(A) provides that an expenditure with respect to an item is treated as made when the original installation of the item is completed.” The IRS then draws the conclusion for you: if installation finishes after December 31, 2025, the expenditure is treated as made after that date, and the credit is not available.
For section 25C the test was always the installation date rather than the purchase date. The IRS credit page, last reviewed April 28, 2026, still states it plainly: “You must claim the credit for the tax year when the property is installed, not merely purchased.”
So the two credits use different statutory words – “placed in service” for 25C, “expenditures made” for 25D – but they arrive at the same practical test. A deposit paid in November 2025 on equipment that went in during January 2026 does not qualify under either one. Writing a check in December was never enough.
The rebate money is a separate appropriation, and it runs to 2031
Here is what almost nobody on the first page of Google tells you. The rebates are not a tax provision at all. They were funded by direct appropriations in the Inflation Reduction Act, they live in Title 42 rather than the tax code, and Public Law 119-21 did not touch them.
The efficiency program at 42 U.S.C. 18795 received “$4,300,000,000” to “remain available through September 30, 2031.”
The electrification program at 42 U.S.C. 18795a received “$4,275,000,000, to remain available through September 30, 2031” for state energy offices, plus “$225,000,000, to remain available through September 30, 2031” for Indian Tribes.
Neither section contains a sunset clause. The Department of Energy’s own program page, last modified July 8, 2026, still opens with the sentence “Home Energy Rebates are now available in select states.”
That is the whole answer to the question people are actually asking. The credit is over. The rebate is running. Whether you can get one depends on your state, not on your tax year.
There is a bill to repeal the electrification rebate, and it has already passed the House
This is the part that belongs in any honest 2026 answer, and we could not find it stated anywhere on the first page of results.
H.R. 4758, the Homeowner Energy Freedom Act, passed the House of Representatives on February 25, 2026 by a vote of 210 to 199. The version printed by the Government Publishing Office that same day is the “Referred in Senate” print, and it carries the line “Received; read twice and referred to the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.”
What the bill actually does is narrow and specific. It repeals “Section 50122 of Public Law 117-169 (42 U.S.C. 18795a) (relating to a high-efficiency electric home rebate program),” along with section 50123 (contractor training grants) and section 50131 (building energy code adoption). Then it adds: “The unobligated balances of any amounts made available under each of sections 50122 and 50131 of Public Law 117-169 are rescinded.”
Read that list again. Section 50122 is the electrification rebate – the one with the $14,000 household ceiling and the $8,000 heat pump line. Section 50121, the efficiency rebate at 42 U.S.C. 18795, is not repealed by this bill. It appears only in a conforming amendment that strikes a cross-reference.
The word “unobligated” is doing almost all of the work
A repeal of a program whose money is already out the door is not the same as taking the money back. The Congressional Budget Office scored this bill on January 15, 2026 and put a number on it: “CBO estimates that about $300 million in unobligated balances will be available for the other two programs at the time of enactment,” and that enacting the bill “would reduce budget authority in 2026 by about $300 million.”
Set that against the $4.275 billion originally appropriated to state energy offices under section 50122. If CBO is right, the great majority of the electrification rebate money has already been obligated to state grantees, and a rescission of unobligated balances would not reach it.
Two honest limits on that reading. CBO gives the roughly $300 million as a combined figure for sections 50122 and 50131 and does not break it out by program, so we cannot tell you how much of it is rebate money. And obligation to a state is not the same as a rebate reaching your kitchen – what a state does with an obligated award once its authorizing section has been repealed is a question no official document we found answers.
We read the whole first page of Google. Here is what it told us.
On July 29, 2026 we opened every result on the first page for “is the heat pump tax credit still available 2026” and checked each one against the statute. We are naming them because the point of this section is that you can repeat the check yourself.
- acdirect.com, published March 17, 2026, states that section 25C continues “through at least 2032” and offers “30% of cost” up to “$2,000 per year” for heat pumps. It links to IRS.gov while contradicting it.
- filterbuy.com, published April 16, 2026, says the credit “gives eligible homeowners 30% of qualifying heat pump costs back on their federal tax return, capped at $2,000 per year,” calls 2026 a good year to upgrade, and gives instructions for claiming it on a 2026 return.
- environmentamerica.org, a nonprofit, carries an article updated June 30, 2024 whose body says the credit runs “through 2032” and whose own correction banner says the credits “have expired as of December 31, 2026.” The banner has the wrong year and contradicts the text below it.
- jaymoodyhvac.com shows a last-modified date of July 2, 2026 but is still written in the future tense: “Beginning January 1, 2026, the federal tax credit for heat pump installations will no longer be available.” It also tells readers the job must be “completed and paid for” by December 31, 2025, which is the payment error described above.
- hvacbase.org, updated July 18, 2026, gets it right, and is the only page we found that also tells the reader the rebate programs “were separately appropriated and survived the OBBBA.” It cites the IRS and a Congressional Research Service product by name but does not link to either.
- vivavolt.us, published January 8, 2026 and modified May 27, 2026, gets it right and states the expiration date plainly.
- beltwayhvac.com, published February 10, 2026, gets the expiration right but never mentions the state rebate programs at all, so a reader leaves believing nothing is available.
- infinityheatingandair.com returned no substantive content on the credit when we fetched it.
That is three pages correct, two flatly wrong, one self-contradictory, one stale in its framing, and one we could not assess. Of the seven we could read, exactly one told the reader the thing that actually matters in 2026.
A test you can apply to any page in ten seconds
A page that has done the work will do two things. It will give a termination date rather than an availability year, and it will link to the statute or to the IRS page it is summarizing, not merely name them. A page that says a credit runs “through 2032” without linking anything is describing the law as it stood before July 4, 2025.
Check the byline date, then check whether the page distinguishes the tax credit from the rebate. Any page that treats them as one program has not understood the question.
Update: the rebate is still here, but it narrowed on May 29, 2026
This article was written before the Department of Energy issued Program Notice 26-2, effective May 29, 2026. Nothing in the notice revives the expired tax credit, and nothing in it ends the rebate. What the notice did was narrow the rebate. Fuel switching was removed from the program, so the gas-to-heat-pump conversion that the old tax credit and the rebate both once reached is being phased out of the rebate as well. Separately, a House-passed bill would repeal the rebate programs outright, though it has had no Senate action since February. Read both tracks in full.
What we could not verify, stated plainly
- Whether the Senate will act on H.R. 4758. Congress.gov blocks automated retrieval, so we took the bill’s status from the Government Publishing Office’s own print. The most recent official version we could find is the February 25, 2026 “Referred in Senate” text. We found no later official version and no record of Senate floor action as of July 29, 2026. This is a live bill, not a settled outcome.
- How much of the roughly $300 million is rebate money. CBO reports it as a combined figure for sections 50122 and 50131 and does not break it out.
- Which state awards are obligated. DOE publishes no ledger of obligations by state, so we cannot tell you whether your state’s money is inside or outside the reach of a rescission.
- Whether any state has changed course because of the bill. Not one of the state program pages we checked mentions H.R. 4758.
- Whether your own 2025 installation qualifies for the credit. That depends on your installation date, your documentation and your return. It is a question for a tax preparer, not for us.
What to do in the next ten minutes
- If your equipment was installed in 2025, dig out the invoice and find the date installation was completed, not the date you paid. That date is what the statute turns on.
- If you are shopping now, stop looking for a federal tax credit. It is not there, and any quote built around a $2,000 credit is quoting a repealed provision.
- Find your state’s own rebate page and read its status line. The rebate is administered by your state energy office, and whether it is open has nothing to do with the tax code.
- Check your utility separately. Utility rebates are a third thing again, funded by ratepayers, and they were not affected by any of this.
- Note the date on whatever page you rely on. In this subject a page more than a few months old is a liability.
Where to go next on this site
We track which states are actually paying, and what each one publishes in its own words, in Home Energy Rebates by State. If the number you care about is the heat pump maximum, we checked which states publish one and which do not in Is the $8,000 heat pump rebate real?. And because the rebate is income-tested in a way the credit never was, the statutory tiers are set out in the income rules behind the $14,000 rebate.
Our sourcing rules, including why we quote statutes rather than summarize them, are in How We Source Our Data. How this site earns money is in 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.