The federal credit some cost pages still advertise has closed

The Energy Efficient Home Improvement Credit, section 25C of the tax code, gave 30 percent ^[1] of certain qualified expenses back as a credit, with a separate annual cap of $2,000 ^[2] for qualified heat pumps, water heaters, biomass stoves or biomass boilers. Thirty percent reaches that cap once qualified expenses pass about $6,667. On HomeGuide’s bands (historical cost estimate, archived source dated December 9, 2025) a two-zone job at the $6,250^[3] midpoint would have come to $1,875, under the cap, while larger multi-zone jobs could reach it. The credit applies to qualified expenses, which are not necessarily the whole installed price.

The IRS page says the credit is nonrefundable, so you can’t get back more on the credit than you owe in taxes, and that it has no lifetime dollar limit: the maximum annual credit could be claimed every year eligible improvements were made. That mattered if you were staging work across two calendar years, which no longer applies.

Read on 2026-08-06 and re-checked on 5 October 2026 against a saved copy, the agency’s own page for this credit states: “You can claim the credit for improvements made through December 31, 2025.” The same page frames the qualifying window as property placed in service on or after 1 January 2023 and before 31 December 2025.

One wrinkle worth knowing if your work was done in 2025: the page says that for items placed in service that year, no credit is allowed unless the item came from a qualified manufacturer and the return reports its Qualified Manufacturer Identification Number. The page names insulation and air sealing materials or systems as the only qualifying property exempt from that requirement. If you are claiming for a 2025 installation, that number needs to come from your installer or the manufacturer, and it is easier to ask for now than in April.

Three practical consequences.

First, if a contractor’s proposal shows a net cost after federal credit, that line is stale for new work and the real number is the gross one. Ask for the figure without it and compare bids on that basis.

Second, without the credit, the case for stepping up an efficiency tier rests on your own run hours and your own electricity price — which is exactly what the running-cost worksheet is for, and why that worksheet leads with a per-hour figure you can multiply by your own honest guess at usage.

Third, state and utility programmes are separate and may still be open; this site does not track them. None of them are on this site, because a stale rebate figure is worse than none at all, which is the exact failure this page exists to correct.