Every question, answered.

A landlord who lets an EPC D-or-below property after 1 October 2030 without a registered exemption faces a civil penalty of up to £30,000 per property, per breach, issued by the local authority's trading standards or environmental-health team. The breach can be recorded on a public register and a publication penalty added — both a deterrent and a search-engine flag for prospective tenants. Tenants gain rights to dispute rent or terminate under specific conditions; the live position is on the official MEES enforcement guidance at gov.uk. Multiple non-compliant lets in a portfolio mean multiple separate enforcement actions, not a single capped fine — a 10-property portfolio is potentially 10 separate £30,000 penalties.

1 October 2030 — a single deadline for both new and continuing tenancies across England and Wales. The DESNZ Government Response of 21 January 2026 confirmed the unified date, scrapping the earlier 2025/2028 ladder which was never enacted into law. From that date every privately let home must meet at least EPC band C under a new dual-metric standard: fabric performance as the primary metric, low-carbon heating or smart-readiness as the secondary. Until 30 September 2030 the legal floor stays at EPC E. There is no phased grace period — a tenancy in place on 30 September 2030 that has not been upgraded becomes non-compliant on day one. Scotland has its own MEES timetable; Northern Ireland has no equivalent regime.

Yes — six recognised exemption categories. All Improvements Made (every cost-effective measure already installed), High-Cost (works exceed the £10,000 cost cap, or 10% of property value for sub-£100k homes via the Property Value Adjustment), Wall Insulation (a qualified expert advises EWI would damage the property — common on listed and stone-built stock), Third-Party Consent (a required tenant, lender, planning or superior-landlord consent was refused), Devaluation (a RICS surveyor reports works would reduce market value by more than 5%), and New Landlord (a six-month transitional exemption). Each must be registered on the PRS Exemptions Register before it has legal effect — an unregistered exemption is treated as a breach. Exemptions last 10 years and must be renewed.

MEES 2030 is the UK regulation that bans the rental of any privately let home in England and Wales rated below EPC band C from 1 October 2030. It is set by DESNZ and enforced by local authorities — civil penalty up to £30,000 per property per breach. Around 2.5 million UK rental homes (DESNZ estimate) sit below EPC C today, which means roughly four and a half years of retrofit work for every fabric, heating and glazing trade in the country. The deadline matters because it converts a soft net-zero ambition into an enforceable per-property fine. For installers, it is the clearest demand signal in UK retrofit history: a fixed date, a known cohort, and landlords actively looking for the people who can do the work.

Around 2.5 million privately rented homes in England and Wales sit below EPC band C today, per the DESNZ estimate published alongside the Government Response of 21 January 2026. That is the cohort that legally must be upgraded to EPC C, registered with an exemption, or removed from the rental market by 1 October 2030. The figure excludes social housing (housing-association and council stock are governed separately), Scotland (different regulations), and Northern Ireland (no MEES regime). Owner-occupied homes are not in scope. Retrofit Radar indexes 17.78 million unique properties across England and Wales — owner-occupied, social and rental — and surfaces the rental subset to installers via tenure and EPC-band filters.

Yes. Every plan ships CSV export with rich columns — postcode, EPC band, recommended measures, retrofit-priority score, and the registered proprietor where you have unlocked it via HM Land Registry. Solo allows 50 lead exports per month; Pro allows 1,000 per month plus an Excel export with extra columns. The CSV imports cleanly into HubSpot, Pipedrive, Copper, Capsule and most spreadsheet-based pipelines. There is no native CRM integration today — we ship a stable column schema instead, so your import mappings keep working as we add fields. API access is on Pro for installers who want to pull rather than export.

Map. Score. Reach. is our three-step loop for finding and contacting retrofit owners. Map is the filter step — pick a postcode plus a radius from 1 to 50 miles, narrow by EPC band, fuel type, tenure and recommended measures, then see results on a live UK map. Score is the rank step — every property gets a 0–100 retrofit-priority score blending EPC band, heating cost, recommended measures and grant eligibility, so the most urgent landlords sit at the top. Reach is the contact step — unlock the registered proprietor at HM Land Registry for £7 per query, or 10 free per month on Pro, then export to CSV and run your own outreach. We do not contact the landlord for you.

Under a minute for a typical search. Sign in with Google, type your postcode and a service radius, pick the EPC bands you target — usually D, E, F and G for MEES work — and the map renders the matching properties immediately. A 5-mile radius around a UK postcode typically returns between 800 and 5,000 D-G properties depending on density. Sort by retrofit-priority score, click any property to see its full EPC history and recommendations, then add to a watchlist or export to CSV. The slowest step is your decision about which patches to focus on, not the search.

Yes — and combining measures is where the workflow earns its keep. The recommended-measures filter accepts cavity-wall insulation, loft insulation, external and internal wall insulation, double or triple glazing, low-energy lighting, heat-pump suitability, solar PV suitability and a handful of secondary controls. Stack them — for example, cavity wall plus loft plus heat pump returns properties where all three are flagged on the EPC, which is your highest-conversion bundle for whole-house retrofit. Pro also adds a recommendations-match filter that scores how well a property matches your specific trade — useful for installers who fit one measure rather than the bundle.

A 0–100 score where higher means more urgent. The weighting: 60% EPC band (G scores 100, F scores 80, E scores 60, D scores 40), 20% modelled heating cost (homes spending over £3,000 a year on heating score higher), 15% number of recommended measures on the certificate (3+ ranks higher), and 5% grant eligibility (Boiler Upgrade Scheme heat-pump suitability adds points). A G-rated home with £4,000 annual heating cost and four recommended measures scores around 92 — retrofit now. A late-D with £1,500 heating cost and two recommendations scores around 35 — retrofit eventually. Sort descending to put the highest-conversion landlords at the top of your day.

Three open UK government registries, all licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0, plus paid HMLR title queries passed through at cost. The MHCLG Energy Performance of Buildings Register supplies around 24 million EPC certificates and the underlying recommendations. Companies House supplies director and registered-office details for limited-company landlords. HM Land Registry supplies the registered proprietor for individual landlords at £7 per title query — we pass that fee through, no markup, with 10 free per month on Pro. We deduplicate the lot on UPRN (Unique Property Reference Number) into 17.78 million unique properties indexed. No scraping, no purchased lead lists.

From the MHCLG Energy Performance of Buildings Register, the official UK government source for domestic EPC certificates in England and Wales. The register currently holds around 24 million EPC certificates; we index them and deduplicate by UPRN into 17.78 million unique properties. The data is published under the Open Government Licence v3.0, free to query, and the same source that fed the now-retiring epc.opendatacommunities.org endpoint. We sync within 14 days of each new certificate being issued, so a property that gets a fresh EPC in early May is searchable on Retrofit Radar by mid-May. Scotland publishes through a separate Scottish EPC register; we do not index Scotland today.

We refresh the full EPC index every 14 days. New certificates issued by domestic energy assessors land on the MHCLG register typically within 24–72 hours of the assessment; we ingest from the register on a fortnightly schedule. Each property in our index carries a last-refresh timestamp so you can see exactly when its EPC data was last verified. Lead-freshness guarantee on every plan: any lead in your export older than 90 days is replaceable on request. The fortnightly cadence is a deliberate trade-off between freshness and the rate-limiting on the source endpoint — a daily refresh is technically possible but expensive enough that we would have to charge for it.

Partially. Companies House data covers limited-company landlords and is free — around 5 to 10% of UK rental titles are owned by registered companies, which we surface at no cost. The remaining 90 to 95% are individual landlords, whose registered proprietor is held only at HM Land Registry. HMLR title queries are licensed by the Crown and cost £7 per query (raised on 9 December 2024 from the previous £3.00 fee that had stood for a decade). We pass that fee through at cost — £7 PAYG on Solo, 10 free unlocks per month on Pro and £7 each thereafter, no markup either way. We are not allowed to bulk-cache HMLR data; each unlock is a fresh, licensed query attributable to your account.

A postcode covers between 10 and 100 properties; a UPRN identifies one. The Unique Property Reference Number is a 12-digit code assigned to every addressable location in Great Britain by Ordnance Survey, published as part of OS Open UPRN under the Open Government Licence. We use UPRN as the primary key for our 17.78 million-property index — it is what lets us deduplicate two EPC certificates issued for the same flat at different times into one property record. Postcode is the search interface; UPRN is the data spine. When you export a CSV, the UPRN column is what you join on if you bring in third-party data later.

Around 5 to 10% of UK rental titles are held by limited companies — typically buy-to-let SPVs, family property holding companies, and small portfolio landlords who incorporated for tax efficiency. Companies House publishes director names, registered office addresses and filing statuses for free. For corporate-landlord properties, we surface the company name, the active directors and the registered office without you needing to spend £7 on an HMLR unlock. That makes corporate landlords the cheapest segment to prospect: free data, often a single decision-maker, and frequently a portfolio of similar properties to upsell once you have built rapport on the first job.

Yes, in almost every case, on a B2B legitimate-interest basis. Property data on Retrofit Radar comes from public UK government registries — EPC, Companies House, HM Land Registry. When you contact a landlord about retrofit work that helps them comply with MEES 2030, UK GDPR Article 6(1)(f) (legitimate interests) and the soft opt-in for B2B marketing under PECR (Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations) typically apply. When you export leads, you become the controller for that downstream marketing — you must give a clear opt-out, identify yourself, and respect any opt-out the landlord has registered with the TPS or CTPS. We surface the lawful basis on every lead row and link to the ICO direct-marketing guidance from /privacy.

MHCLG retires the legacy epc.opendatacommunities.org endpoint on 30 May 2026 and consolidates onto the new Find an Energy Certificate service. Our ingestion adapters cover both the legacy and replacement endpoints, so the refresh cadence on Retrofit Radar is unaffected through the cutover. The data-sources page banner will update once the new endpoint is the only one in use.

BUS is open to homeowners and private landlords across England and Wales, regardless of income, who replace a fossil-fuel heating system with an MCS-certified air-source heat pump, ground-source heat pump, biomass boiler, or air-to-air heat pump system. Grant values: £7,500 ASHP/GSHP, £5,000 biomass, £2,500 air-to-air. The grant is applied for by the installer, not the homeowner, and paid as a discount on the invoice. Eligibility excludes new builds and properties with valid loft/cavity insulation recommendations on their EPC that have not been actioned. The scheme is open through March 2030 with a £400m annual budget for FY26-27. See the official BUS policy note on gov.uk for the full eligibility list.

MCS — Microgeneration Certification Scheme — is the UK quality mark required for any installer whose customer wants to claim the Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant. Without MCS certification, no BUS grant flows through your work, which on a £12,000 ASHP install is £7,500 of customer money you cannot unlock. MCS certifies the firm, not the engineer, and covers heat pumps, solar PV, batteries, biomass and small wind. The public registry at mcscertified.com is searchable by trade and postcode. Around 5,250 contractors hold MCS today across all renewable trades; only around 2,200 are heat-pump certified, which is the bottleneck the Warm Homes Plan needs to break.

Search your postcode plus a radius and Retrofit Radar returns the off-gas EPC D-G rentals — usually a few hundred to a few thousand within a 10-mile patch in rural Wales or the South West, fewer in dense gas-grid urban areas. Heat-pump suitability layers on top: rentals with current heating fuel of oil, LPG, solid fuel, coal or biomass score highest because they have no incumbent gas connection to defend. The retrofit-priority score weights these properties up automatically. A typical Welsh or rural English heat-pump installer working a 30-mile patch sees between 1,200 and 8,000 candidates depending on density. Wales over-indexes — household MCS uptake is 8.74%, the UK highest, against an England average of 5.86%.

ASHP — air-source heat pump — extracts heat from outside air using a unit that sits outside the house, looking like a small air-conditioner. Install cost £8,000–£14,000, BUS grant £7,500, footprint a couple of square metres. GSHP — ground-source heat pump — extracts heat from the ground via a buried loop or borehole. Install cost £18,000–£35,000, BUS grant £7,500, requires significant garden or land. ASHP is around 90% of new UK heat-pump installs because the install footprint is smaller, the cost gap is large, and the performance gap closes once outside temperatures sit above 0°C. GSHP shines on rural properties with land and high heat demand. Retrofit Radar surfaces both filters, and our retrofit-priority score weights ASHP-suitability higher by default.

Yes. The fuel-type filter accepts mains gas, oil, LPG, solid fuel, electric, biomass and district heating. The off-gas signal — oil, LPG, solid fuel, biomass — is the highest-converting cohort for ASHP and GSHP work because the incumbent fuel cost is already two to three times mains-gas pricing, so the heat-pump payback maths is tight. Around 1.7 million UK homes are off-gas; rural Wales, the Scottish Borders and Northumberland over-index. Combine the fuel-type filter with EPC band D-G and a recommended-measures filter for "low-carbon heating" to get the cleanest off-gas heat-pump pipeline. Boiler-replacement leads — homes with mid-life gas boilers — are filterable too, though conversion rates lag the off-gas cohort by a wide margin.

EWI is a thermal layer fixed to the outside of a building, typically 90–150mm of mineral wool or expanded polystyrene plus a render or brick-slip finish. It is the dominant retrofit measure for solid-wall homes — usually pre-1920 stock with no cavity to inject. Cost £4,000 for a small terrace to £25,000 for a large detached. EWI delivers the biggest single SAP-point uplift available, often moving a property two full EPC bands. Internal wall insulation (IWI) is the alternative where planning, listing or aesthetic constraints rule EWI out — cheaper material cost but loss of internal floor area. Filter Retrofit Radar to property-age pre-1920 and wall-type "solid" to surface the EWI cohort directly.

Three EPC fields tell you. Wall type "cavity" or "filled cavity (uninsulated)" means a cavity exists. Construction year between roughly 1920 and 1990 is the typical UK cavity-wall era. The recommendations panel lists "cavity wall insulation" as a measure if the cavity is unfilled. Retrofit Radar surfaces all three — filter to wall-type cavity, age 1920–1990, and recommended measures including "cavity wall insulation". The remaining qualifier is on-site: a borescope check confirms the cavity is wide enough (usually 50mm+) and free of debris. Around 5 million UK homes have unfilled cavities; CIGA-certified installers fit them in a single day at £400 to £1,500 per dwelling. Conversion is fastest among privately rented homes flagged with the recommendation.

TrustMark is the UK retrofit quality body; PAS 2035 is the BSI standard for whole-house retrofit design and project coordination. You need it for any government-funded retrofit work — ECO4, Warm Homes Plan, the now-closed GBIS — and for cost-cap exemption claims under MEES. PAS 2030 is the install-side companion specification covering the actual installation work. If you only fit privately funded measures (a homeowner paying cash for cavity-wall insulation), TrustMark plus PAS 2030 is sufficient. If you want to be on the rails for the £13.2bn Warm Homes Plan funding flow, PAS 2035 plus a registered Retrofit Coordinator on every project is non-negotiable. Retrofit Radar flags properties with active grant eligibility automatically.

Yes. The property-type filter accepts terraced (mid and end), semi-detached, detached, flats and bungalows. For insulation work this is decisive: cavity-wall installers ignore solid-wall pre-1920 stock; EWI installers ignore mid-terrace where two of four walls are party walls; loft-insulation installers ignore top-floor flats. Combine property-type with construction year and wall-type filters to land precisely on the cohort you fit. A typical EWI installer filters to detached and end-of-terrace, pre-1920, solid wall — that combination cuts a 5,000-property patch down to 200–400 high-conversion candidates. The full filter set is documented on the how-it-works page; export-to-CSV preserves every filter you set.

Three live grant streams in May 2026. ECO4 — open through 31 December 2026 — funds insulation and heating upgrades for low-income households, routed via TrustMark and PAS 2030 installers. The Great British Insulation Scheme closed to new applications on 31 March 2026 after delivering around 130,800 measures; past tense for new work. The Warm Homes Plan — £13.2bn confirmed at Spending Review 2025 — is being rolled out through FY 2025-26 to 2029-30 with delivery mechanisms still being finalised. For private MEES retrofit work, no direct landlord grant exists; the cost is the landlord's, capped at £10,000 per property under the MEES cost-cap rule, with a Property Value Adjustment to 10% for sub-£100k homes.

Solar PV — photovoltaic — converts sunlight directly into electricity. The dominant UK install at around 4,040 MCS-certified contractors; typical job size £5,000–£12,000 for a 4–6 kWp domestic system. Solar thermal uses sunlight to heat water in a roof-mounted collector that feeds a hot-water cylinder. Niche today — under a few hundred UK installers — because the payback maths struggles against cheap mains gas and the kit competes with cylinder space needed for heat pumps. PV is the volume play, especially when paired with battery storage (around 1,790 MCS battery-certified UK installers). Retrofit Radar surfaces roof-suitability data from the EPC where available; we do not yet integrate satellite-derived shading models, though that is on the roadmap for v1.5.

Roof-orientation data is on the EPC for around 60% of UK certificates issued since 2018 — the assessor records the predominant roof aspect. Filter Retrofit Radar by roof orientation south, south-east or south-west to surface the highest solar-yield properties in your patch. A 5-mile radius around a typical English postcode returns 200 to 1,500 south-facing-roof rentals depending on density. The remaining 40% of properties have unrecorded orientation; we surface those too with an "unknown" flag so you can choose to include or exclude them. Future versions will overlay LIDAR-derived rooftop area and shading scores from public Environment Agency datasets — currently in scoping, not yet shipped.

Solar PV is not directly grant-funded for private homeowners or landlords in 2026 — the Boiler Upgrade Scheme covers heat pumps and biomass only, and the Smart Export Guarantee (SEG) replaced the Feed-in Tariff in 2020 with a market-rate export buy-back rather than a grant. ECO4-funded solar exists for low-income households where solar is part of the recommended package, until ECO4 closes on 31 December 2026. The Warm Homes Plan is expected to fund some solar-plus-battery work but specific eligibility criteria are still being detailed by DESNZ. MCS certification remains required for any export-tariff or future grant eligibility, so the cert pays for itself even without direct grant flow today.

Yes — and the bundle is one of the strongest conversion patterns we see. A heat pump increases a home's electricity demand significantly; pairing it with solar PV plus battery storage offsets a meaningful slice of that demand at the homeowner's marginal generation cost rather than retail tariff. Filter Retrofit Radar by EPC band D-G, fuel type off-gas (oil, LPG, solid fuel) and roof orientation south-facing — that intersection is the cleanest bundle pipeline. Around 1,790 UK installers are MCS-certified for batteries alongside solar PV. Pro plan unlocks the recommendations-match filter that ranks properties by how many of your trades the property needs, so a heat-pump-plus-solar installer can sort by "needs both" first.

Filter Retrofit Radar by glazing type "single" or "fully single-glazed" to surface them directly. The EPC records glazing type for every property at assessment — older Victorian and Edwardian terraces over-index, as do listed and conservation-area properties where past replacement work was constrained. A typical 5-mile radius around a UK postcode returns 100 to 800 single-glazed rentals depending on stock age. Add a property-age filter (pre-1920, 1920–1949) to concentrate on the highest-conversion cohort. Single-to-double glazing on a 3-bed terrace lifts the EPC by 3 to 8 points and runs £4,000 to £8,000 — a clean MEES-driven sales pitch when the property is at high D or low E. Around 10,000 FENSA-certified glazing firms in the UK, so the trade is competitive.

FENSA — Fenestration Self-Assessment Scheme — is the UK self-certification body for window and door installers. It lets a registered installer self-certify that a window or door installation complies with Building Regulations (Part L thermal performance, Part F ventilation) without needing a separate Building Control sign-off on every job. FENSA registration is functionally non-optional for any commercial UK glazing installer — without it, every job needs a full Building Control inspection, which kills your install economics. Around 10,000 FENSA-registered firms in the UK; CERTASS is the smaller alternative scheme. Retrofit Radar does not currently filter by installer-side certification, but we surface property-side filters (glazing type, glazed area, age) that match where FENSA work concentrates.

Partially. The EPC records glazing type — single, double pre-2002, double post-2002, triple — but does not always carry an installation date for windows. We filter by the type bands directly: pre-2002 double-glazing typically fails modern Part L thermal performance and is a strong replacement candidate, while post-2002 double-glazing is generally compliant. Triple glazing is filterable too but rare in the UK rental stock — under 5% of properties. Combine window-type with EPC band D-G and the "replace single-glazed" recommendation flag to surface the cleanest replacement cohort. Future versions will integrate FENSA database lookups for installation dates; that is on the v1.5 roadmap, not currently shipped.

Not directly. There is no live UK grant scheme dedicated to window replacement for private homeowners or landlords in 2026. Window upgrades are bundled into ECO4-funded whole-house packages where the recommended-measures list flags glazing, but ECO4 closes on 31 December 2026 and is restricted to low-income households. The Warm Homes Plan is expected to include glazing in some eligibility tiers but specific delivery rules are still being detailed by DESNZ. For private MEES retrofit work, glazing falls under the £10,000 landlord cost cap — meaning a £6,000 window replacement can sit alongside £4,000 of insulation within the cap before exemption rules trigger. FENSA installers should lead on the MEES deadline and the cost-cap maths rather than wait for a dedicated grant.

Solo at £99 a month is built for one tradesperson covering one postcode patch (postcode plus 1–30 mile radius), with 50 lead exports per month, a 100-property watchlist, three saved searches, basic filters and CSV export. HMLR owner unlocks are £7 each, pay-as-you-go. Pro at £299 a month is built for a multi-area crew running its whole pipeline through the tool: unlimited UK coverage, 1,000 lead exports per month, unlimited watchlist, advanced filters (recommendations-match, retrofit-priority score, BUS-eligibility, Wales-only), CSV plus Excel export with rich columns, 10 free HMLR unlocks per month, weekly Monday email digest, API access and a 24-hour support SLA. Both tiers are self-serve — sign up and subscribe immediately via Polar.

£7 per HMLR registered-proprietor unlock, passed through at cost with no markup. HMLR raised the title-query fee to £7 on 9 December 2024 (up from the previous £3.00 fee that had held for a decade) — the first rise in a decade — and we pass the new fee through directly. Solo plan is pay-as-you-go: £7 each unlock, billed against your account in £1 increments. Pro plan includes 10 free unlocks per month (a £70 value) and £7 each thereafter. Companies House data — for limited-company landlords, around 5–10% of UK rental titles — is free on every plan; HMLR is only required for individual landlords. Each unlock is a fresh, licensed query attributable to your account; we are not allowed under HMLR licensing to bulk-cache or resell the data.

Yes. Upgrade in-app at any time; we prorate the difference against your current billing cycle and charge the proration immediately via Polar. Polar is our Merchant of Record — they handle UK and EU VAT automatically — so the proration appears on your card statement as a Polar charge rather than a Retrofit Radar charge. Downgrades (Pro to Solo) take effect at your next billing date rather than immediately, so you keep Pro features for the rest of the paid month. Annual plans can switch tiers mid-year on the same proration logic. Cancel any time from the billing settings page; cancellation takes effect at the next renewal. No retention call, no win-back sequence — one click.

Cancellation stops future renewals from the next billing date — you keep access to the rest of the period you have already paid for, and there is no pro-rata refund of the current month or year. UK B2B Consumer Contracts Regulations 14-day cancellation does not apply because the service is sold business-to-business. If something is genuinely broken on our side and you cannot use the product, email and we will refund the affected period as a goodwill credit on the next invoice.

Yes — the underlying property records are the same public dataset for every customer. We do not gate properties to one installer or "lock" patches. Two things blunt the lead-stealing concern in practice. First, the pipeline is huge: around 2.5 million MEES-affected rental homes across England and Wales, against roughly 22,000 retrofit-relevant trades businesses — every patch has more work than its installers can clear. Second, the patch-radius filter (typically 5–30 mi) means only installers physically near a property compete for it, which is a much smaller set than your full search returns. If you want true lead exclusivity, that is a different product (closed-marketplace lead-gen) and we link to two competitors that offer it from /faqs.

Retrofit Radar processes personal data (sign-in details, IP addresses, lead-export history) and so registers with the ICO as a UK data controller under the Data Protection (Charges and Information) Regulations 2018. The ICO registration number is shown in the footer of every page once registration is confirmed; if the footer does not show one yet, processing is being kept to the minimum needed to complete sign-up while registration is being submitted. Email hello@example.com for the current status.