A public view · for housing and place
When does a refit pay?
One English social housing estate, 305 homes, compiled from the public record and priced one at a time. At today's prices, five pay back a whole home retrofit inside fifteen years. Move the gas price and the queue forms, one home at a time. The estate's average, read as a single row, never joins it.
With gas at today’s price, homes modelled to pay back inside fifteen years:
5 of 305
300 still say no at this price
“Today” means the July 2026 price cap (gas 5.74p, electricity 24.5p per kWh); the slider moves gas from there, and electricity follows at 0.55 times the move.
One price moves; every home’s own costs and savings hold still.
Every step is a single home changing its answer. The estate average, read as one row, crosses near +400%, far beyond this chart. There is no moment the estate becomes worth doing; there is a queue, and the price sets your position in it.
273
homes still say no with gas up 120%
102
of those are on community heating, where the question was never a heat pump in each home
The story behind this view
This estate is the subject of our article on what an average can and cannot tell you about a retrofit business case, including why this one's opportunity was mostly taken years ago, and what that means for the homes that remain.
Read: The Average Crosses OnceYour stock has its own queue
This social housing estate was compiled from records that are already public, and the same can be done for any place in England. Name a patch, a local authority or a postcode area, and we will return your stock's first cut: how many homes cross today, and where the queue starts.