Which utility serves you decides your heat-pump rebate

Quick answer: what actually changes

On top of those, your utility may add its own, and that layer is where territory decides the outcome. If you are in Burlington, it does regardless of income.

How to tell which utility serves your address

As a rough orientation, Burlington Electric Department is the municipal utility for the City of Burlington, and Green Mountain Power serves much of the surrounding area including South Burlington, Colchester, Essex, Williston, Shelburne and beyond. Municipal boundaries do not always match intuition, and a few Vermont towns are served by other municipal or cooperative utilities entirely, so the bill settles it and a map does not.

If the property is a rental and you do not hold the electric account, the owner does, and for a heat-pump project the owner is normally the one applying for the rebate anyway.

Every incentive, side by side

Amounts stack, layer on layer. The table lists what each program publishes today. An Efficiency Vermont discount and a utility rebate are separate programs, and income-qualified adders are additional again.

Burlington Electric Department territory

BED sets a lower bar to qualify. Its rebates are open to residential and small-business customers in existing buildings, with no income test on the base amount. Two details are worth knowing before you compare proposals. The centrally ducted high-performance rebate requires the system's cross-over temperature to be set to 15°F: that is a commissioning setting, not an equipment specification, so it should appear in writing on the proposal instead of being assumed. And the air-to-water rebate, at up to $12,000, is the largest local incentive available. It matters specifically because it suits an older Burlington house with radiators or baseboard and nowhere to run ducts.

• Mini-split heat pump (Burlington addresses only): $2,100 or $2,500 (Income-qualified adders of $400–$500)
• Centrally ducted heat pump (Burlington addresses only): $1,350–$5,450 (high performance) ($500 income-qualified bonus)
• Air-to-water heat pump (Burlington addresses only): Up to $12,000 ($2,000 per ton) ($400 income-qualified adder)

Green Mountain Power territory

GMP publishes the thresholds by county and household size. For Chittenden, Franklin and Grand Isle counties the published figures are $72,700 for one person, $83,100 for two, $93,500 for three, $103,850 for four and $112,200 for five. The application is made through Efficiency Vermont's site, which combines the GMP and Efficiency Vermont rebates into one step, not two.

If your household is above those thresholds, the Efficiency Vermont statewide discount still applies to you in full. Only the utility layer is income-tested here, not the whole incentive.

• Heat pump (GMP addresses: income-qualified): $2,000 per condenser (The rebate itself is the income-qualified benefit)

Vermont Electric Cooperative territory

VEC works differently again. It does not run a heat-pump rebate of its own the way Burlington Electric or Green Mountain Power do. Read directly from VEC's own program page: a VEC member gets the same statewide Efficiency Vermont instant discount every address qualifies for, and may separately qualify for a one-time $150 'thermal efficiency adder' if the building meets VEC's stated thermal efficiency criteria: claimed through VEC's own online form, not through Efficiency Vermont's application. Larger systems (centrally ducted, ground-source, air-to-water) route through Efficiency Vermont's single credit, the same as everywhere else in the state.

The practical effect: the utility-layer difference that matters so much between BED and GMP largely does not exist on VEC. The number to budget from is the statewide Efficiency Vermont figure, not a VEC-specific rebate.

• Heat pump: thermal efficiency adder (VEC addresses): $150 adder, plus the statewide Efficiency Vermont discount

Natural gas territory changes a different decision

Gas service is a separate question entirely. Whether the property has natural gas service available is a separate question from the electric utility, and it changes the comparison instead of the rebate. Where natural gas is connected, a high-efficiency gas boiler or furnace remains a live alternative and the running-cost comparison against a heat pump depends on your actual gas and electric rates. Where it is not, which is most of the rural service area, the realistic incumbent fuels are delivered oil or propane, and the operating-cost case for a heat pump is usually stronger against those than against natural gas.

Do not let a proposal compare against a fuel you do not have. Ask for the comparison to be run on the fuel actually serving the building, at current rates.

The federal credit is gone, and a lot of published advice has not caught up

Not available for property placed in service after December 31, 2025. It was formerly $2,000 per year for qualified heat pumps, water heaters, biomass stoves or biomass boilers.

Any guide, contractor proposal or rebate calculator still showing a 30% federal credit or a $2,000 federal credit for a system installed today is out of date. Vermont's utility and Efficiency Vermont incentives are separate from the federal credit and are unaffected by its expiry.

What to ask before you sign

Incentives are applied differently depending on the program: some are instant discounts through a participating distributor, some are claimed afterwards, and some require a specific commissioning setting or a qualifying model. A proposal that shows a single 'after rebates' number without naming which programs it assumes is not something you can verify or compare.

• Which specific programs the quoted rebate assumes, named individually
• Whether each is an instant discount or claimed back afterwards, and by whom
• Whether the proposed model is on the qualifying product list for those programs
• For BED high-performance ducted systems, that the 15°F cross-over setting is written into the scope
• What the price becomes if any assumed rebate turns out not to apply