Norway installs roughly fourteen times more heat pumps per household than Britain does. Not because Norwegians care more about the climate, and not because Oslo writes bigger cheques. It is because in Norway a kilowatt-hour of electricity costs little more than a kilowatt-hour of gas, and in Britain it costs around four times as much. Heat-pump adoption in Europe tracks that ratio, and remarkably little else.
That is the uncomfortable finding buried in the European Heat Pump Association’s own data: the map of where heat pumps sell is almost a photographic negative of the map of where electricity is expensive relative to gas. Subsidies move the picture at the margins. The price ratio draws it.
The one number that predicts heat-pump uptake
The relevant figure is the electricity-to-gas price ratio — how many units of gas a household could buy for the price of one unit of electricity. A heat pump running at a coefficient of performance of three delivers three units of heat per unit of electricity, so as a rule of thumb it only beats a gas boiler on running cost when electricity costs less than three times as much as gas. The EHPA puts the safe target lower, at 2.5:1, and calls anything above 3:1 a cause for concern.
Line the ratio up against sales and the relationship is not subtle.
| Country | Electricity-to-gas price ratio | Heat pumps sold per 1,000 homes (2024) | Heat pump share of new heating |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sweden | 1.5 | ~30 | 92% |
| France | ~2.5 | 17 | 45% |
| Germany | ~3.25 | 5 | 27% |
| United Kingdom | ~4 | 3.5 | — |
Finland and Sweden are the only two countries in Europe where electricity costs less than twice as much as gas. They are also, with Norway, the countries where heat pumps are simply what a house has. Most of the rest of the continent sits above 3:1, and the EHPA finds that the member states with the lowest ratios record three times the heat-pump sales of those above 3:1. Britain, where electricity has averaged 4.4 times the price of gas and which sits third-worst in Europe behind Germany and Belgium, manages 3.5 sales per thousand homes against Norway’s 48. That is the fourteen-fold gap, and it is not a gap in enthusiasm.
Why the bill decides, not the boiler
A heat pump is the more efficient machine almost everywhere. The IEA’s 2026 Heat Pump Monitor has them running at three to five times the efficiency of a gas boiler. Efficiency is not the same as cheapness, and the household pays the second, not the first.
The reason is what sits on top of the raw energy cost. Across Europe, roughly half of a domestic electricity bill is taxes, levies and network charges rather than the electricity itself, and in most countries electricity carries a heavier policy load than gas does. Decades of energy policy loaded the cost of the grid, of renewables support, of social tariffs, onto the electron and spared the molecule. The IEA states the consequence plainly: where electricity bears higher taxes and levies than fossil fuels, the incentive to install a heat pump is weakened “even when their energy performance is superior.”
So the superior machine loses at the meter. A German household that spends €12,000 on a heat pump, at two to three times the cost of a boiler, then discovers that a ratio of 3.25 hands back much of the efficiency as a running-cost penalty. The efficiency is real. It is taxed away.
The spring rebound is a price story, not a policy one
Here is the natural experiment. European residential heat-pump sales rose 17% year on year in the first quarter of 2026 — about 575,000 units across eleven countries, up from 494,000. France, Germany and Poland averaged 25% growth. This followed a brutal couple of years: sales across 19 countries fell 22% in 2024 to 2.31 million, before a modest 11% recovery in 2025.
What changed in the spring of 2026 was not a wave of new subsidy schemes. It was the price of gas. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz on 2 March pushed gas and oil prices up sharply across Europe, and the effect on sales was, in the EHPA’s data, “particularly pronounced from March onward.” Gas got more expensive, the ratio tilted back towards the heat pump, and households bought heat pumps. The machine did not improve. The arithmetic did.
This cuts both ways, and it should. When gas is cheap, as it was through 2024, the same arithmetic tells the household to keep the boiler, and 2024’s 22% collapse is what that looks like. A technology whose sales swing twenty points on the gas price is a technology being bought on running cost, not conscience.
The subsidy objection, in its strongest form
The obvious rebuttal is that subsidies clearly do matter. Austria cut its support and residential sales fell 30% in a single quarter. Britain’s Boiler Upgrade Scheme helped drive a 56% jump in UK installations in 2024, against a falling European market. Take the cheque away and the market contracts; add one and it grows. That is not nothing, and any honest version of this argument has to hold it.
It holds, but it does not overturn the ratio — it sits underneath it. A subsidy is paid once, against the upfront cost. The price ratio is paid every month for the fifteen-year life of the machine. A grant can start a market; only the running-cost maths keeps it running without one. The tell is in Britain’s own numbers: that headline-grabbing 56% surge was growth off a floor so low that the country still sits at 3.5 installations per thousand homes, fourteen times behind Norway. Subsidy bought the spike. The ratio set the plateau it spiked from.
And Norway is the case that gives the game away. It leads Europe with almost no heat-pump subsidy to speak of, because it has almost no piped gas and some of the cheapest hydro electricity on the continent. There is nothing cheaper to run against and nothing to tax the alternative up to. The ratio question barely arises, and the heat pumps went in anyway.
What would change our mind
This is a falsifiable claim, so here is the disproof. Show a country with an electricity-to-gas ratio durably above 3:1 that reaches Nordic penetration on subsidy alone, holding the punitive ratio the whole way. Or show a country that strips the levies off electricity, brings the ratio below 2.5, and then does not see adoption climb. Either result would sink the thesis. We do not expect to see them.
What we would watch instead is whether any large European government finally does the boring, decisive thing: move the policy costs off the electricity bill and onto gas or a carbon charge, so the meter stops punishing the efficient machine. The EU’s Electrification Action Plan points that way, and the 2030 target ratio of 2.5:1 is the number that matters more than any installation subsidy in any budget.
The hardware is ready. The IEA reckons two-thirds of US homes already have the conditions for a heat pump, and American heat pumps have outsold gas boilers four years running in a market where the ratio, in most states, finally works. The machine has been ready for years. The bill is the holdout — and the bill is a political choice, not a law of physics. As with home batteries when net metering ends, households do the sums before they do anything else. Fix the ratio and the heat pumps follow. Leave it, and no subsidy will buy what Norway gets for free.
Photo by alpha innotec on Pexels · Photo by alpha innotec on Pexels