Would you pay more for a home with a heat pump?
You can bet I would.
I’d gladly fork over more money to bypass a gas or oil furnace, which—unlike an all-electric heat pump—spews toxic combustion byproducts, runs the risk of poisoning my family with carbon monoxide, and contributes to climate change. And while heat pumps, which provide both heating and cooling, typically cost more up front than conventional furnaces, they’re two to four times as efficient, and so could save me money in the long run.
Apparently, I’m not alone in prizing the comfort, safety, and economic benefits of these appliances.
Heat pumps give home values a boost, according to a new report by the nonprofit Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative, which studies consumer behaviors, interests, and concerns in the energy transition; 257, a customer-intelligence platform that profiles US. residential property characteristics for contractors, utilities, and others; and the trade group the National Association of Realtors. Their analysis showed that homeowners who install a heat pump can recoup up to a quarter of its cost just by mentioning it in real estate listings when they’re ready to sell.
While some homeowners may invest in a heat pump for its environmental bona fides, for most people, economics trumps all, said Scott Rosenberg, a cofounder and chief executive officer of 257. “A homeowner who puts a garage on, redoes their bathroom, improves their kitchen, always thinks, ‘Am I going to get this value back?’”
By analyzing more than half a million sales of US homes with ducted heat pumps from 2024 to 2025, the authors found that those with real estate listings mentioning the heat pump typically enjoyed a sales price boost of 0.6 percent to 1 percent over homes that didn’t advertise their efficient appliance. This modest lift translates to $2,300 to $3,900 per home, given a median sale price of $399,000.
“Just shy of $4K doesn’t sound like a lot of money on a home sale,” Rosenberg said. “But it’s actually a meaningful piece of the investment that you made to get the heat pump in the first place.”
In 2026, a ducted heat-pump system costs on average about $15,400, per energy marketplace EnergySage—though prices vary wildly depending on the region, a home’s size and electrical service, and local contractors, to name a few variables. A comparable gas furnace plus central AC system can cost half that, according to home services platform Angi. Mentioning a home’s heat pump in the sale listing, assuming the appliance cost around the average price, can recoup about 15 percent to 25 percent of the outlay.
Now, every home is different, and people willingly pay premiums for a wide variety of attributes, such as the floor plan, the views, and neighborhood vibes.
But Rosenberg is confident that when it comes to real estate listings, the heat-pump price bump is real, because of the approach his team used and the amount of data they analyzed. 257 used a machine learning technique to cluster homes across hundreds of attributes to identify those that are nearly identical, he said. Then, within those clusters, sales prices were contrasted for those homes where the heat pump was or wasn’t mentioned in the listing.
Yueming “Lucy” Qiu, an economics professor at the University of Maryland, called the report “very valuable” for helping to gauge the premium that people place on heat pumps. “I’m actually very happy that this came out,” said Qiu, who investigated the matter years ago at a smaller geographic scale.
In 2020, Qiu and her colleagues published a peer-reviewed study in Nature Energy that looked at home sales across 23 states from 2000 to 2018 for whether the presence of a heat pump improved the property’s sale prices.
Notably, to control for differences between homes that could influence price, her team looked at individual abodes that sold both before and after a heat pump was installed. They then compared the differences in sales prices (adjusted for inflation) with those for homes that hadn’t gotten a heat-pump makeover. Residences with heat pumps sold for a 4 percent to 7 percent, or $10,400 to $17,000, premium on the $240,000 average home price.
That’s a much bigger boost than the latest report identifies, but that’s because the groups investigated different questions. Qiu’s team asked, What’s the value of a heat pump? Whereas 257 asked, Once a home has a heat pump, what difference does highlighting it in the real estate listing make?
“We weren’t trying to make the case for energy efficiency but rather to study whether it’s valued once it’s there,” Rosenberg said.
Qiu would love to see a follow-up study in which Rosenberg and colleagues analyze a subsample of homes with the methods she used in her paper. “Just as a robust check to see if, using similar methods, they find a similar magnitude [to what] we do,” she said.
Homebuyers are asking real estate agents more frequently about energy-efficient upgrades—not only for environmental reasons “but also to control and maintain their monthly costs, like their utility bills,” said Matt Christopherson, director of business and consumer research at the National Association of Realtors.
Yet Realtors often struggle to convey the benefits of energy-efficient features to clients, according to the recent report, which looked at a range of technologies. More than half of Realtors surveyed said they were “not too confident” or “not confident at all” in their ability to explain the benefits of heat pumps.
Real estate agents are the ones writing the listings, Rosenberg pointed out. In homes with a heat pump, it was mentioned in the listing just 8 percent of the time.
If real estate agents become more aware that potential buyers are willing to pay more for homes with heat pumps, and they lean into promoting the appliances, Rosenberg believes “that’ll have a virtuous-cycle effect of reinforcing and signaling to buyers that this is something they should pay attention to.”
Of course, some of us are already keeping our eyes peeled for listings that give heat pumps and other clean-energy perks a shoutout.
This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Source: Wired
