Almost every page about the federal home energy rebates leads with the same number: $14,000. Very few of them tell you that $14,000 is a ceiling across seven separate appliance categories, that it only applies to one of the two federal programs, and that whether you get 100 percent of your project cost, 50 percent, or nothing at all is decided by a single line in the statute about your county’s median income.
This page sets out what the law and the federal agencies actually publish about income eligibility, and marks clearly where they publish nothing. Last verified against official sources: July 29, 2026.
The $14,000 is a ceiling across seven categories, not an offer
The Home Electrification and Appliance Rebates program is written into federal law at 42 U.S.C. 18795a. The statute sets a separate maximum for each qualifying measure:
- Heat pump for space heating and cooling: not more than $8,000
- Heat pump water heater: not more than $1,750
- Heat pump clothes dryer: not more than $840
- Electric stove, cooktop, range or oven: not more than $840
- Electric load service center (your panel): not more than $4,000
- Electric wiring: not more than $2,500
- Insulation, air sealing and ventilation: not more than $1,600
Add those up and you get $19,530. The statute then caps the household: a household receiving multiple rebates may receive “not more than a total of $14,000”. So $14,000 is what you would reach only by replacing several systems at once, at full published maximums, in a state that publishes those maximums, while funding is still open.
You can read the section yourself at the U.S. Code text of 42 U.S.C. 18795a.
The two income lines that decide everything
The same statute sets exactly two income lines, and they do not work the way most summaries describe them. The rebate covers “100 percent of the cost of the qualified electrification project” for a household whose annual income is less than 80 percent of the area median income. It covers “50 percent of the cost of the qualified electrification project” for a household whose income is “not less than 80 percent and not greater than 150 percent” of the area median.
Above 150 percent there is no tier. The statute simply does not describe such a household as eligible: it defines the eligible household as one whose total annual income is “less than 150 percent of the median income” for the area.
That matters more than the dollar maximums do. If your income is above the 150 percent line, the $8,000 heat pump figure is not a smaller number for you. It is not a number for you at all under this program. You would be looking at the 25C tax credit or at a state or utility program instead, which are different things with different rules.
The efficiency program uses completely different logic
There is a second federal program, Home Efficiency Rebates, written at 42 U.S.C. 18795. It pays for measured or modeled whole-home energy savings rather than for specific appliances, and its income line sits at 80 percent of area median income, not 150 percent.
For a household above that line, a project modelled to cut energy use by 20 to 35 percent is worth the lesser of $2,000 and 50 percent of project cost; at 35 percent savings or more, the lesser of $4,000 and 50 percent of cost. For a household below 80 percent of area median income, those become the lesser of $4,000 and 80 percent of cost, and “the lesser of $8,000 per single-family home or dwelling unit” and 80 percent of cost.
This is the single largest source of confusion online, and it is worth stating plainly: $8,000 appears in both programs and means two entirely different things. In the electrification program it is the maximum for one heat pump. In the efficiency program it is the maximum for a whole-home retrofit that hits a 35 percent modelled savings target, and only for a household under 80 percent of area median income. A page that quotes “$8,000” without saying which program it means has not told you anything usable.
What DOE itself publishes, and what it does not
We checked what a member of the public can actually read on energy.gov today.
The Department of Energy’s main Home Energy Rebates page carries a modification date of July 8, 2026. On income it says only that “Grantees may increase rebates for households with income less than 80% of the area median”. It gives the two headline ceilings, up to $8,000 for the efficiency program and up to $14,000 for electrification, and then directs readers to their state or territory energy office.
DOE’s public FAQ fact sheet goes slightly further. It states in a footnote that “Only families making less than 150% of their area median income are potentially eligible”, and describes coverage as up to 100 percent for lower-income families and up to 50 percent for moderate-income families. It does not define which incomes those two labels refer to, and the document carries no revision date on its face.
Two program-specific DOE pages we tried, the ones an ordinary search would land on for each program by name, returned 404 errors on July 29, 2026.
So the clean tier table that dozens of commercial sites publish, 80 percent for 100 percent coverage and 80 to 150 percent for half, does not appear in plain language anywhere on DOE’s own public pages that we could find. It is in the statute. We had to read the statute to state it, which is why we have linked it above rather than asking you to trust us.
Area median income is a county number, and it moved on May 1, 2026
Area median income is not a state figure and not a national one. It is published per metropolitan area and per non-metropolitan county by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and it is revised every year.
The current set is the FY 2026 Income Limits, effective May 01, 2026. HUD’s query tool documents how the limits were built “for any area of the country selected by the user”, and it is the only place we will point you for your own number: HUD Income Limits, FY 2026.
One practical warning about that lookup. HUD publishes the 80 percent line directly, as its “low income” limit, broken out by household size. It does not publish a 150 percent line. That figure has to be derived from the area median family income HUD documents alongside the limits. If a website hands you a confident 150 percent threshold for your county, the useful question is which median it started from and which fiscal year that median came from.
The 40 percent low-income set-aside is gone
If you read guidance written in 2024 or 2025, you will see repeated references to a requirement that states reserve a large share of these funds for low-income households. DOE Program Notice 26-1, issued May 29, 2026, removed the 40 percent low-income set-aside and simplified the blueprint approval process.
It is worth being precise about what that did and did not do, because the change has been described online in both directions. It did not cancel any state’s program. It did not reduce any state’s allocation. What it removed was a federal requirement that a fixed share of the money be held for low-income households. Its companion, Notice 26-2, did make a substantive change to which projects qualify, and that is covered in the update at the end of this article. Whether a given state still prioritises low-income applicants is now that state’s decision, and several do. The notices are published at Program Notice 26-1 and Program Notice 26-2.
Four states publish their income tiers clearly. Most do not.
Federal law sets the tiers, but you do not apply to the federal government. You apply to a state program, and the state decides how to describe, document and verify your income.
Of the nineteen states we track, four publish their income tiers in a form a homeowner can act on: California, Florida, North Carolina and Colorado. Their official pages are California Energy Commission, Florida HEAR, Energy Saver North Carolina and the Colorado Energy Office.
The rest fall into two groups. Some describe the federal tiers in general terms without saying how they will be documented. Others have not published an income section at all, because their program is not open to applications yet. In neither case can we tell you what paperwork you will be asked for, and we are not going to guess.
Where those per-state “income guide” pages come from
Search for your state and the word “income” and you will find pages titled something like “Georgia Energy Rebate Income Guide 2026 AMI Thresholds & Eligibility”, and near-identical pages for Illinois and Michigan.
Those three states are on our list of states that publish no heat pump maximum at all. The income thresholds on such pages are not quotes from a state program. They are HUD’s county tables multiplied by the statutory percentages. That arithmetic is not wrong, and it can be a reasonable estimate. But it is a model, not a rule a state has committed to, and it will not survive contact with an application form if the state ends up documenting income differently, using a different fiscal year, or counting household size differently.
The tell is simple. A page quoting a state’s own rule will link to the state’s own page and say when it was read. A page publishing a derived model usually does neither.
Income sets your rebate tier, but it had nothing to do with the federal tax credit, which carried no income test and terminated for property placed in service after December 31, 2025. The Heat Pump Tax Credit Ended. The Rebate Did Not. explains the split.
Update: the income rules did not change, the eligible project did
This article was written before the Department of Energy issued Program Notice 26-2, effective May 29, 2026. The income thresholds described here, which are tied to area median income, were not altered by the notice. A second test now sits alongside them. The notice removed fuel switching from the program, so qualifying on income is no longer sufficient if the project replaces a non-electric appliance. The notice also requires that a home use rebates for insulation and air sealing before heating and cooling upgrades, unless it is already sealed to a level the state has specified and DOE has approved. Read the full account of what the notice changed.
What we could not verify, stated plainly
- No federal page we could find publishes the 100 percent / 50 percent / 80 percent / 150 percent structure in plain language for the public. We took it from the statute.
- Two DOE program-specific pages returned 404 on July 29, 2026.
- DOE’s public FAQ fact sheet carries no revision date on its face.
- We did not attempt county-level income figures for any state. There are thousands of them, they change annually, and the only correct source is HUD’s own lookup.
- We have not verified how any state documents or audits income at application, because most have not published that.
How to check your own position in ten minutes
- Work out which program you are actually asking about. Appliances and panel work is the electrification program with the 150 percent line. Whole-home retrofits measured on savings is the efficiency program with the 80 percent line.
- Look up your county in HUD’s FY 2026 income limits and find the 80 percent figure for your household size.
- If you are under it, the statute contemplates 100 percent of project cost under the electrification program, subject to your state actually running one.
- If you are over it, find your area’s median family income in the same HUD documentation and compare 150 percent of it against your household income.
- Then, and only then, open your own state’s official page and check whether it is taking applications at all. That is where most of these projects actually stop.
We keep the state-by-state status list current here: Home Energy Rebates by State: Who Is Actually Paying in 2026. If your question is specifically about the heat pump number rather than the income line, we took that apart separately in Is the $8,000 Heat Pump Rebate Real?.
Our sourcing rules, including which kinds of sites we refuse to take dollar figures from, are set out in How We Source Our Data. How this site earns money, and what that does and does not influence, 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.