HVAC Marketing Statistics 2026: Heat Pump Volumes, Cooling Demand and Lead Costs

Britain has spent decades treating cooling as somebody else's problem. That assumption is now being tested every summer, and the data is starting to show it.

The UK is in an unusual position. It has a mature, government-subsidised heating market with published quarterly statistics, and a cooling market so young that the national housing survey only started asking households whether they switch on an air conditioner in the most recent wave. Marketers working in HVAC are selling into two demand curves that behave nothing like each other.

What follows comes from primary sources: DESNZ deployment tables, English Housing Survey annex tables, Met Office climate records, REFCOM's live F-Gas register, BSRIA market reports, and paid search and keyword benchmarks.

Key HVAC marketing statistics for 2026

• Around 1.01 million English households, roughly 4.1% of the 24.4 million total, say they switch on an air conditioner to keep cool in summer, against about 12.4 million that use a fan. English Housing Survey 2024-25 [2]
• 12.4% of English dwellings, some 2,974,000 homes, were reported for overheating in 2024. English Housing Survey 2024-25 [2]
• The UK installed 10,693 retrofit heat pumps in 2026 Q1, down 18% on the previous quarter and 22% year on year. DESNZ [1]
• The four quarters of 2025 total 53,265 retrofit heat pumps, about 11.8% of the government's stated 450,000-a-year ambition for 2030. DESNZ, author calculation [1]
• 99% of 2026 Q1 installations were air-to-water, up from 90% in 2021 Q1, whilst ground and water source fell to just 68 units in the quarter. DESNZ [1]
• 10,695 F-Gas certified companies and 29,930 registered F-Gas engineers sit on the REFCOM register as of August 2026. REFCOM [5]
• Global air conditioning demand has risen 245% since 2010, with commercial chiller prices up 3.6% and air handling unit prices up 4.5% in 2025. BSRIA [7]
• Air conditioning installation and repair search ads average $9.68 CPC and $127.74 cost per lead, against a home services average of $7.85 and $90.92. LocaliQ [8]
• UK searches for "portable air conditioner" hit 173,406 in July 2025 and 5,875 in December 2025, a 29.5-fold swing. Ahrefs Keywords Explorer [9]
• Cooling and ventilation accounted for 11.2% of energy use in UK offices in 2024, the highest share of any services sub-sector. DESNZ ECUK 2025 [6]
• July 2026 was the UK's second warmest July on record at 17.4°C mean temperature, 2.1°C above the 1991-2020 average. Met Office [4]

How many UK homes actually have air conditioning?

Roughly one in twenty-five. The English Housing Survey 2024-25 records about 1.01 million English households switching on an air conditioner as a summer cooling measure, against 24.4 million households in total, from a sample of 14,280 [2].

Among households that reported overheating, 7.5% used air conditioning. Among those that did not, 3.7% did [2].

Fans dominate. Some 58.7% of overheating households and 49.8% of others switch one on, about 12.4 million households in total, roughly twelve times the air conditioning figure [2].

This is the single most important structural fact about UK cooling. The addressable market is not people who already own air conditioning and need it serviced, as it is in the US. It is people who own a £30 fan and have never priced a split system.

Cost pages, planning permission questions and running cost comparisons will therefore out-earn "air conditioning repair" pages for most UK installers. The market is still in the education phase, not the replacement cycle.

How much overheating is there for the industry to sell against?

Enough to matter, and it is concentrated in the housing types most able to pay. The English Housing Survey reported 2,974,000 dwellings, 12.4% of occupied stock, for overheating in 2024 [2].

Detached houses were worst at 15.5%, followed by bungalows at 14.4% and semi-detached at 12.5%. Flats came in lowest at 10.5%, and 13.1% of owner-occupied dwellings were reported against 10.6% of social rented [2].

The pattern runs against intuition. Public discussion of overheating focuses on top-floor flats, and those are genuinely at risk, but the volume of affected homes sits in owner-occupied detached and semi-detached stock. That is also where the money is. The postcode-level overlap between detached housing, owner occupation and reported overheating beats a generic radius around your depot as a targeting model.

How fast is UK air conditioning demand actually growing?

The underlying driver is growing fast. The Met Office reports that the hottest day of the year in southeast England rose by 4.5°C comparing 2016-2025 with 1961-1990, roughly triple the rate of mean annual warming, whilst days above 30°C in Greater London quadrupled over the same comparison [3].

2025 was the UK's warmest year on record, the sixth time that record has fallen this century [3]. July 2026 came in as the second warmest July on record at 17.4°C, with 258.7 sunshine hours, the sunniest July since 1910 [4]. Globally, BSRIA puts the increase in air conditioning demand at 245% since 2010 [7].

Weather is the demand generator and it is the thing you cannot plan around. Build the assets in March so they are indexed and converting when the first heat-health alert lands, rather than commissioning a cooling page in the second week of a heatwave against competitors with twelve months of link equity.

One caution on the 245% figure. It is a global measure across 18 AC markets, driven heavily by India, southeast Asia and data centre cooling. It is not a UK residential number.

How many heat pumps is the UK actually installing?

Fewer than the trajectory needs, and 2026 started badly. DESNZ recorded 10,693 retrofit heat pump installations in 2026 Q1, an 18% fall on 2025 Q4 and a 22% fall on the same quarter a year earlier [1].

Source: DESNZ heat pump deployment statistics, 2026 Q1 release. Annual totals summed by the author from Table 1.1 [1].

The Warm Homes Plan, published in January 2026, sets out an aim of 450,000 heat pump installations a year by 2030 [1]. On the 2025 total that is about 11.8% of the way there.

The technology mix has collapsed into one product. Air-to-water accounted for 99% of 2026 Q1 installations against 90% five years earlier, and ground or water source fell to 68 units in the quarter, down from 1,492 in 2022 Q1 [1].

This matters more than it looks. Ground source content is chasing a market of a few hundred installations a year nationally, whilst air-to-water is a genuine volume category. Anyone maintaining a balanced content split across both is spending half the budget on almost nothing.

There is also a live opening. MCS confirmed in April 2026 that air-to-air heat pumps are being brought into the scheme, with eligible installations able to access a £2,500 Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant and Technical Supervisors required to hold RACHP Level 3 competence [10]. That is the point at which air conditioning and subsidised heating stop being separate markets in the UK.

Where in the UK is the work?

Heavily in the South. In 2026 Q1 the South East took 18% of installations, the South West 14% and the East of England 13% [1].

London showed the fastest five-year growth, up 624% from 70 installations in 2021 Q1 to 507 in 2026 Q1, albeit from a very small base [1]. The falls are as instructive: Wales dropped from 1,422 installations in 2025 Q4 to 749 in 2026 Q1, whilst Northern Ireland rose from 9 to 30 [1].

Devolved grant timing explains a good deal of this, which is why national-average marketing plans go wrong in this sector. A campaign built on UK-wide install numbers will over-invest in regions where a scheme has just closed.

How many businesses are competing for HVAC work?

More than most operators assume, and the register is public. REFCOM, which describes itself as the UK's largest F-Gas register, listed 10,695 certified F-Gas companies, 29,930 registered F-Gas engineers, 306 Elite companies and 21 Elite supplier businesses as of August 2026 [5]. The Federation of Environmental Trade Associations separately represents over 400 manufacturers, suppliers, installers and contractors [11].

Set 10,695 certified companies against roughly 53,000 heat pump installations and a million air-conditioned households and the competitive density is obvious.

The 306 Elite companies are the interesting number. Fewer than 3% of certified firms hold the higher credential, which makes it a scarce trust signal rather than a commodity badge, and one almost nobody uses properly.

What do HVAC leads cost through paid search?

More than most home services categories, and considerably more than the trade averages people quote. LocaliQ's benchmark of 3,211 US home services search campaigns running from April 2024 to March 2025 puts air conditioning installation and repair at $9.68 average CPC and $127.74 cost per lead [8].

Source: LocaliQ home services search advertising benchmarks, 3,211 US campaigns, April 2024 to March 2025 [8].

Both HVAC categories sit around 40% above the home services average cost per lead. This is US data on US pricing and intent volumes, so treat it as a relative ranking rather than a UK cost forecast.

The conversion rate is the weak link. Air conditioning converts at 6.56% against 7.33% across home services and 9.08% for electricians [8]. Clicks are not the problem in this category. Landing pages that fail to answer install cost, disruption and planning questions are.

How seasonal is HVAC search demand?

Extremely, and far more so than heating. Ahrefs volume history for Great Britain shows "portable air conditioner" at 173,406 searches in July 2025 and 5,875 in December 2025, a 29.5-fold peak-to-trough ratio [9].

Installer-intent terms swing less violently but still hard. "Air conditioning near me" ran at 2,368 in July 2025 against 289 in October 2025, an 8.2-fold gap, and had already reached 1,521 by July 2026 [9].

Source: Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, Great Britain, August 2026 [9].

The gap between "commercial air conditioning" at $3.50 and "commercial air conditioning installation" at $0.50 is worth a second look. Similar volumes, seven times the click cost, and the cheaper term carries the more explicit buying intent. That mispricing survives because agencies bid the obvious head term and stop.

"Air conditioning maintenance" at 1,500 searches a month and $0.40 CPC is the same story. Maintenance is the contract that produces recurring revenue and first refusal on replacement work, and it is priced as an afterthought.

Should the budget go to emergency repair or planned installation?

In the UK, more of it should go to planned installation than most operators assume. "Air conditioning installation" runs at 2,400 UK searches a month against 2,000 for "air conditioning repair", and installation carries roughly double the CPC at $2.50 versus $1.30 [9].

That is the inverse of the plumbing and heating pattern, where emergency demand dominates and repair terms are the expensive ones. It follows from installed base. You cannot generate emergency cooling repair demand from a stock of one million air-conditioned households.

Heat pump terms behave differently again. "Heat pump installation" draws 3,600 UK searches at $3.00, "heat pump grant" 2,400 at $3.00 and "air to air heat pump" 2,100 at $1.80 [9]. Grant-led intent is a large slice of that, which leaves the campaign hostage to policy announcements in a way pure cooling work is not.

The practical split for a UK firm doing both: reactive repair funds the heating side through winter, planned installation carries the summer, and maintenance contracts stop the two peaks from being the only revenue in the year.

How much cooling do commercial buildings actually use?

More than the residential picture suggests, and it is concentrated in offices. DESNZ end use data puts cooling and ventilation at 958.2 ktoe in 2024, 5.0% of energy use across UK services buildings, with offices the outlier at 11.2% [6].

Source: DESNZ Energy Consumption in the UK 2025, end use tables, Table U5 [6].

Here is the trap. Services sector cooling and ventilation energy fell from 1,131.4 ktoe in 2017 to 958.2 ktoe in 2024 [6]. Read carelessly, that looks like a shrinking commercial cooling market.

It almost certainly is not. Equipment efficiency has improved sharply, LED retrofits reduced internal heat gains, and hybrid working cut occupied office hours after 2020. Energy consumed is a poor proxy for equipment installed or maintenance contracts signed.

How to read these numbers

The heat pump figures are official statistics in development, drawn from MCS certification records. They exclude non-certified retrofit installations and most new-build work, and DESNZ notes that methodology changes in the 2026 Q1 release captured more social housing installations than before [1]. Annual totals here are the author's sums of published quarterly figures, not DESNZ headline annuals.

The air conditioning household figure is self-reported. Respondents were asked what measures they take to keep cool, not whether a unit is installed, so it measures use rather than ownership, and there is no comparable prior-year figure to establish a growth rate.

The LocaliQ benchmarks are US campaigns in US dollars: useful for ranking categories against one another, useless as a UK budget input.

Ahrefs volumes are modelled clickstream estimates, not Google-reported counts. Month-to-month figures for seasonal terms are the least reliable part of that model, so treat the 29.5-fold swing as an order of magnitude. BSRIA's 245% is global demand across 18 markets and says nothing directly about Britain.

What this means going into 2027

Air-to-air entering MCS is the structural change to plan for. Once air conditioning installations can attract a £2,500 Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant, the marketing language of cooling in the UK stops being about comfort and starts being about subsidised efficient heating [10].

Expect installation intent to keep outpacing repair intent in cooling for several more years. A market with roughly a million air-conditioned households out of 24.4 million cannot generate a mature service and repair demand curve, whatever US benchmarks suggest [2].

Heat pump volumes need watching rather than assuming. A 22% year-on-year fall in 2026 Q1 against a 450,000-a-year ambition is a large gap, and grant-dependent search terms move with policy rather than weather [1].

Regional planning beats national planning. A five-year swing of plus 624% in London and a halving quarter in Wales inside the same dataset is scheme timing, not noise [1].

Finally, build the summer assets in winter. The gap between 5,875 and 173,406 monthly searches is not a campaign you can react to [9]. If you want help working out how findable your HVAC business really is in search and AI answers, you can book a call with me.